This American Life on Healthcare

Many insights on the american healthcare system from the stellar NPR show, such as:

• Having more doctors raises healthcare costs (the supply drives the demand, unexpectedly - an upward sloping demand curve, egads)
  
• One third of medical spending is on procedures that do not make us any better ... (like that time when a doctor prescribed a CAT scan for me when I reported a blocked nose)
  
• Perverse incentives - doctors get paid more for prescribing more procedures, even when they might hurt more than help
  
• The Prostate Cancer PSA test - the issue with false positives. When you run a test across the entire population, you are going to identify a whole lot of people as positive who never would have developed the cancer.
  
• Patients as Plaintiffs - doctors reject guidelines and do not follow evidence based treatment, just to minimize the chance of getting sued
  
• Hospital monopolies are just as bad for consumers as insurance monopolies.
  
• Costs will keep rising until consumers make sacrifices (and they will not make sacrifices if part of the costs are not passed on to them).
  
• Patients unwittingly side with doctors when negotiating prices of procedures, even if if makes sense to side with the insurers as they are the ones representing us financially
  
• Medical facilities and insurers have similar levels of profitability. And if they are running on a fixed margin basis, there is no incentive to keep costs down.
  
• Costs are going up so fast that there is broad consensus that something has to change. Things are hopeless across the board, and that gives us hope that something will be done.