#26 - The Cost of Health

The infamous fact is that we in the US spend vastly more on healthcare than any other country without necessarily getting better services or outcomes. The last time I checked, we spend about 20% of our national GDP on healthcare. Anecdotally, I know tons of people, including myself, who have dealt with outrageous and unpredictable medical bills. In fact, in a 2009 study in the American Journal of Medicine, 62% of bankruptcies were caused by medical issues.

With that said, how should we view healthcare? As a commodity like anything else that we consume? Or as a social good, as a right, where any and everyone receives proper and affordable healthcare?

With the complexity of this issue, we could only do it justice by covering it in 2 parts.

In part one, we dive into the area that most concerns us: cost. We discuss the role that insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies play in cost.

In part two: we compare the US system to other systems around the world. You may be surprised but there’s a lot that we can learn.

We hope this series sheds light on the mystifying world of the US healthcare system while helping us understand the pressing need for us to reform it. When we say that it’s time to build a new America, we mean that.

I got the amazing opportunity to speak to Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal. She's the author of the New York Times Best Selling Book An American Sickness - How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back.

Dr. Rosenthal was for 22 years a reporter, correspondent, and senior writer at The New York Times before becoming the editor in chief of Kaiser Health News, an independent journalism newsroom focusing on health and health policy. She holds an MD from Harvard Medical School, trained in internal medicine, and has worked as an ER physician.