The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care--and How to Fix It

by Marty Makary

Hospitals are marking up their bills by 2 to 23 times what Medicare would pay for the same services.4 Further, our research showed that hospitals playing the pernicious markup game were also the most likely to sue.

Researchers, including me, had lobbied the government to give us access to the national Medicare data.

The medicalization of ordinary life is so widespread it’s hard to avoid.

the real drivers of health care costs are legacy stakeholders, like hospitals, insurance companies, or drug companies, or all the middlemen I’m exposing in this book. There are so many hands taking money out of the system that there’s no silver bullet solution to save money. To lower costs, we must take on the powerful stakeholders.

Instead of teaching every medical student how to refract people’s eyes to fit them for eyeglasses, how about teaching teamwork and communication skills? I learned the Krebs cycle, but not how to communicate effectively with nurses.