Estimated waste in American health-care spending
AMERICA has a talent for wasting money on health care. It has devised many ingenious ways to do this. A patient may see many skilled specialists, none of whom co-ordinate with one another. Payment systems are unfathomably complex and highly variable. Doctors order duplicative or unnecessary tests. The country excels at treating sick people and does a horrible job keeping them from getting sick in the first place. All these problems, however, are due to a simple, structural failing: the more services a hospital provides, the more it is paid.
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