Dr Tom Vogt, MD, MPH

Although it has some of the world's finest technologies, among developed nations, the US has the shortest life expectancy, the highest infant mortality, and the lowest public approval of its health care system.  It is the only developed nation lacking universal health care.  Despite these shortcomings, the US spends about twice as much per capita on health care as any other nation on earth.  These facts are easy to verify, and many books and thousands of journal articles attest to them.  But 30 years of congressional debate on health care reforms has never addressed the fundamental reasons for this poor performance or how to catch up with other nations.  This is NOT a party issue.  Democrats and Republicans have both avoided discussing these facts honestly and proposing solutions to the underlying problems.  We have the world's most costly and inefficient healthcare system - one that wastes between 1.0 and 2.4 trillion dollars every year while providing worse results than other nations.

This talk will discuss how the system came to be that way and what needs to change if we want to improve care and reduce costs.