Medics from Colerain Township in Ohio tending to a patient. Which hospital a person is taken to could make a significant difference in the medical outcome, according to a new study.
Credit: Ty Wright for The New York Times

At the heart of America’s vaunted health care system is a frustrating puzzle. The United States pays three times as much per citizen as the average of other wealthy nations—far more than even the second-highest spender, Switzerland, adding up to $3 trillion a year. Yet for all that enormous expenditure, we come in dead last among those nations in lifespan. And as the bills climb, our life expectancy is actually shrinking. (emphasis added)

What’s going so wrong? If our national health care were a corporation, that return on investment would get its CEO immediately fired. Plenty of experts are ready to point fingers at various causes: our lack of universal health care, industrialized food system, suburban lifestyles, and profit-driven tangle of insurers and drug companies and hospitals. Surely those play […]