Yeah I liked that Time article. I spent 4 years working across the street from MD Anderson in Houston so I liked his description of the Texas Medical Center glass skyscrapers as reminiscent of Dubai. Sure seems like there's something wrong with that when people are getting fabulously wealthy off the backs of people who are sick and dying and paying tens of thousands of dollars in hope of possibly extending their life a few months in the face of cancer.

"Rescue" medical care in this country is awesome. I think people who get in car accidents, have heart attacks, have septic shock, etc. in this country generally get amazing care and have really great outcomes. Cancer care is great in this country as well. And this care is legitimately expensive, although not as expensive as hospital charges obviously.

Why is health care so expensive? Because patients don't ask (and if they ask then nobody knows the answer to the question) "How much is this going to cost?" Patients only ask, "My insurance is going to cover this, right?" Since "somebody else" is paying the costs skyrocket.

Really there are two ways to fix health care: 1. Price transparency with high-deductible insurance and the majority of costs for the majority of patients paid from health savings accounts OR 2. Single payer government health care, extending basic Medicare/Medicaid type coverage to everyone.

Option 1 would work if costs and quality/outcomes for every visit and every procedure test were mandated to be posted on the internet by every health care provider and patients paid out-of-pocket (had "skin in the game") for all this stuff. That would bring back competition and price transparency that is now sorely lacking. But I think eventually this country will work itself to Option 2 because that is where public sentiment seems to be in my experience. That's why Obama won the election. People who have no problem paying $1000 for a car repair bill are outraged if they have to pay $1000 for a medical bill. Most people don't want to take personal responsibility for the cost and quality of their own health care -- people want their taxes to pay for it and the government to regulate it tightly. And I do think that probably at the end of the day single payer government funded health care will be the most efficient and cheapest system that we could have.