Odd Lots - Introducing Prognosis Season 4: America's Broken Health-Care Costs

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Americans are paying more and getting less for their health care than ever before. On the new season of Prognosis, reporter John Tozzi explores what went wrong. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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slash audio. That's vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk vanguard marketing Corporation Distributor. American healthcare is the most expensive in the world. Yet for all the money we put into it, Americans are sicker and die younger than people in other wealthy countries. In every country, life expectancy is going up, in every country they're spending more, but per dollar, how much is life expectancy going up? And in the U.S., it's a lot less than in other countries.

I'm John Tazi, a health care reporter at Bloomberg News. On the new season of prognosis, we look at how the American health care system got to this point and how its hefty price tag forces people to make difficult decisions in their everyday lives. We were looking to buy a house, so we had been saving up for a down payment, and we were thinking, like, well, one uncovered ER visit could wipe out a significant chunk of what we have as a down payment for a house. We'll also look at what some people are trying to do to fix the system. patients didn't feel fulfilled, physicians didn't feel fulfilled, and then we got to a point

where after they changed how we were practicing and pushed more volume and so forth, we just said we'd had enough. The new season of Prognosis is out now. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra.

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