Terrence Mcnally Podcast

Aired: 02/03/13 This 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