‘Overcharged is just what the doctor ordered.’ —Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, former dean, Harvard Medical School
Why is America’s health care system so expensive? Why do hospitalized patients receive bills laden with inflated charges that com out of the blue from out-of-network providers or demands for services that weren’t delivered? Why do we pay $600 for Epi Pens that contain a dollar’s worth of medicine? Why is more than $1 trillion – one out of every three dollars that passes through the system – lost to fraud, wasted on services that don’t help patients, or otherwise misspent?
Overcharged answers these questions. It shows that America’s health care system, which replaces consumer choice with government control and third-party payment, is effectively designed to make health care as expensive as possible. Prices will fall, quality will improve, and medicine will become more patient-friendly only when consumers take charge and exert pressure from below. For this to happen, consumers must control the money. As Overcharged explains, when health care providers are subjected to the same competitive forces that shape other industries, they will either deliver better services more cheaply or risk being replaced by someone who will.
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David A. Hyman is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and a Professor of Law at Georgetown University. A doctor as well as a lawyer, Hyman served most recently as the Ross and Helen Workman Chair in Law and Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois, where he directed the Epstein Program in Health Law and Policy.