Q&A: David Goldhill, Author - CATASTROPHIC CARE: How American Health Care Killed My Father And How We Can Fix It

Aired: 02/03/13This week, my guest is DAVID GOLDHILL. After the death of his father, Goldhill, a business executive, began a personal exploration of a health-care industry that for years has delivered poor service and irregular quality at astonishingly high cost. His September 2009 Atlantic cover story rocked the health-care world, and Goldhill has written a book expanding on the topic, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father-And How We Can Fix It. It is a system, he argues, that is not worth preserving in anything like its current form. He asserts Obamacare will not fix it, and offers his own radical solution. * As a nation, we now spend almost 18% of our GDP on health care. * In 1966, Medicare and Medicaid made up 1% of total government spending; now that figure is 20%.* The federal government spends - 8 times as much on health care as it does on education-- 12 times what it spends on food aid to children and families-- 30 times what it spends on law enforcement-- 78 times what it spends on land management and conservation-- 87 times the spending on water supply-- 830 times the spending on energy conservation.* For every two doctors in the U.S., there is now one health-insurance employee-more than 470,000 in total. In 2006, it cost almost $500 per person just to administer health insurance.* Of the 52 industries represented on Fortune's 2007 list, pharmaceuticals and medical equipment ranked third and fourth, respectively, in terms of profits as a share of revenue. From 2000 to 2007, the annual profits of America's top 15 health-insurance companies increased from $3.5 billion to $15 billion.