Daily conversations in healthcare are increasingly dominated by money. Healthcare reform is relentlessly focused on cost cutting. Hospitals are frantically developing strategies to keep themselves profitable in a newly-capitated system of financing. Health professionals are struggling to maintain their incomes in the face of declining payments. And medical bills are now the largest cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. Fifty years ago, healthcare was not so tightly linked to money. It has become so money-focused largely because, over the same period, healthcare spending increased from 5 percent to 18 percent of GDP, greater than any other segment of the U.S. economy.
