Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care

Front Cover
Cato Institute, Jul 3, 2018 - Medical - 582 pages

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 EpiPens 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.

 

Selected pages

Contents

The Problems Obamacare
23
CHAPTER 3
71
CHAPTER 4
89
CHAPTER 5
105
CHAPTER 12
107
CHAPTER 6
117
CHAPTER 7
139
CHAPTER 8
153
CHAPTER 16
297
CHAPTER 17
315
Bargains Galore in Bangalore
341
CHAPTER 19
357
CHAPTER 20
371
CHAPTER 21
387
CHAPTER 22
484
CHAPTER 9
508

CHAPTER 13
245
CHAPTER 14
261
PART 2
273
Health Care Is Expensive Because Its Insured
279
Making a Killing on the Terminally
549
Morality and Health Care
551
Copyright

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Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care
Charles Silver,David A. Hyman
Limited preview - 2018

Common terms and phrases

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About the author (2018)

Charles Silver, MA, JD, holds the Roy W. and Eugenia C. McDonald Endowed Chair in Civil Procedure at the University of Texas School of Law, where he teaches about civil litigation, health care policy, legal ethics, and insurance. His writings on class actions and other aggregate proceedings, litigation finance, medical malpractice, and legal and medical ethics have appeared in leading peer-reviewed journals and law reviews.

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.

Bibliographic information

TitleOvercharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care
AuthorsCharles Silver, David A. Hyman
PublisherCato Institute, 2018
ISBN1944424776, 9781944424770
Length582 pages
Subjects › 

Medical / Health Policy
Medical / Practice Management & Reimbursement
Political Science / General
  
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