the Natural Condition

Health Affairs, a journal dedicated to health policy, published an article today that reports on the forecast for healthcare spending in the US. In 2007, America spent about 16% of its Gross Domestic Product on healthcare. By 2017, that number is expected to rise to about 20% of GDP (a total of about $4.3 trillion). A 4% increase may not seem like much, but it represents a proportional growth that outpaces the adjusted growth for the 2017 GDP. By my calculations, the dollar amount of a 4% increase in healthcare-spending-as-proportion-of-GDP would cost more than current budgets for the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, Education, and Energy, combined.¹ The following chart shows the forecast for this increase:

^{Image courtesy of Health Affairs.}

This growth is equivalent to about a 6.7% increase in Read the rest of this entry »

I was at an interview for medical school a few weeks ago, and was asked the question:

What do you think is the greatest problem facing healthcare today?

In the following paragraphs I outline the gist of my response, and some embellishments on the topic.

While I was in college, I can remember attending a lecture by the former United States Surgeon General Dr. C. Everett Koop. While Dr. Koop is best known for his monumental work in enhancing public awareness about the dangers of cigarette smoking (indeed, he is the one responsible for the warning labels prominently displayed on all packs of smokes), he actually spent most of his career pioneering the field of pediatric surgery at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He is a most distinguished graduate of Dartmouth College (class of 1937), and, more interestingly for the non-Dartmouth readers, he was interviewed on the Ali-G show, so clearly he merits profound respect.

At the time of this lecture, Dr. Koop was almost 90 years old. I was expecting to hear a speech from a elderly man whose wisdom would be sadly muffled by his frailty. It turned out that he still spoke with a loud and penetrating voice Read the rest of this entry »