Recently, “60 Minutes” (in my view the last bastion of great traditional network news investigative reporting) described a for-profit hospital system that apparently uses percent targets (allegedly 20%) to encourage high admission rates by their ER doctors.

In setting up this report, the reporter commented that as much as 10% of healthcare expenditures in this country were “unnecessary.”

Actually, most health experts I have read and consulted would put that number much …

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I recently said I would describe the essential elements of “true reform.” I realize others might add or subtract from my list, but here it is – at least for today:

Payment reform. I put this first because no matter what form or structure healthcare takes, without payment reform it will be doomed to failure. And by “payment reform” I mean switching from the “fee for service” model I discussed in …

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Having established that the U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the average per person cost in all other developed countries – but with no better overall results – it is time to ask how this happens.

Obviously, there are many factors contributing to this dangerous cost escalation, but in my mind two stand out.

The first is our unrealistic expectations as American healthcare consumers. Here are a bunch …

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