How U.S. Health Care Became Big Business

Health care is a trillion-dollar industry in America, but are we getting what we pay for? Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, a medical journalist who formerly worked as a medical doctor, warns that the existing system too often focuses on financial incentives over health or science. "We've trusted a lot of our health care to for-profit businesses and it's their job, frankly, to make profit," Rosenthal says. "You can't expect them to act like Mother Teresas."

Dr. Elisabeth RosenthalRosenthal's new book, An American Sickness, examines the deeply rooted problems of the existing health-care system and also offers suggestions for a way forward. She notes that under the current system, it's far more lucrative to provide a lifetime of treatments than a cure. "One expert in the book joked to me ... that if we relied on the current medical market to deal with polio, we would never have a polio vaccine," Rosenthal says. "Instead we would have iron lungs in seven colors with iPhone apps."

On what consolidation of hospitals is doing to the price of care: "In the beginning, this was a good idea: Hospitals came together to share efficiencies. You didn't need every hospital ordering bed sheets. You didn't need every hospital doing every procedure. You could share records of patients so the patient could go to the medical center that was most appropriate. Now that consolidation trend has kind of snowballed and skyrocketed to a point ... that in many parts of the country, major cities only have one, maybe two, hospital systems. And what you see with that level of consolidation is it's kind of a mini-monopoly"...