So I think the general perception is that the American healthcare system is just messed up.

Is the American healthcare system as messed up as most people seem to think it is?

Oh, I think absolutely the US health system is as messed up as people think it is probably

more so.

That is Zach Cooper.

He is a healthcare economist at Yale.

I think the challenge which makes it hard to address is that there are pockets of amazing

care and amazing innovation surrounded by a sea of dysfunction.

If there are two fundamental drivers of our broken costly healthcare system, I would

say it's pricing failures and inappropriate care.

And that is Marty McCarrie.

He is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins and the author of The Price We Pay, What Broke American

Healthcare and How to Fix It.

We did a national survey asking physicians across the country.

That percent of medical care in your opinion is unnecessary.

The average answer was 21%.

If one in five services delivered in any industry is entirely unnecessary, you'd say that's

where the waste is and that's where we need to focus.

As we've noted before on the show, even doctors respond to incentives and the incentives

in our healthcare system encourage procedures more than prevention.

But it's not just unnecessary procedures that McCarrie is talking about.

Over the past two decades, the number of prescriptions issued in the US is nearly doubled.

...