This is a very unsettling and eye opening article, written by David Goldhill, from the Atlantic Monthly about the sorry shape of the American health care system.  After the author's father passed away from an infection picked up during a hospital stay, he set out to investigate the health care industry.  What he found was that approximately 100,000 Americans die every year from infections acquired from hospitals.  Nearly 200,000 deaths occur annually from blood clots that form following surgery or illness.  Here's a short snippet from How American Health Care Killed My father:

Indeed, I suspect that our collective search for villains -- for someone to blame -- has distracted us and out political leaders from addressing the fundamental causes of our nation's health-care crisis. A;; of the actors in health care -- from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies -- work in a heavily regualted, massively subsidized industry full of structural distortions.  They all want to serve patients well.  But they also all behave rationally in response to the economic incentives these distortions create.  Accidentally, but relentlessly, America has built a health-care system with incentives that inexorably generate terrible and perverse results. Incentives that emphasize health-care over any other aspect of  health and well-being.  That emphasize treatment over prevention.  That disguise true costs.   That favor complexity, and discourtage transparent competition based on price or quality.  That result in a generational pyramid scheme rather than sustainable financing.   And that -- most important -- remove consumers from our irreplacable role as the ultimate ensurer of value.

To read How American Health Care Killed My Father in its entirety, please visit the link below