Elisabeth Rosenthal is the author of An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It. A medical doctor, she currently serves as the editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News (KHN) in 2016, the independent foundation-funded reporting project focusing on health and health policy news. Some of her accomplishments: She spent 22 years as a correspondent at the New York Times, where she covered a variety of beats from healthcare to the environment to reporter in the Beijing bureau, when in China she covered SARs, bird flu and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in rural areas, she is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School, and briefly practiced medicine in a New York City emergency room before turning to a profession to journalism.

Dr. Rosenthal talked about the state of medical care in the United States in which visits to hospitals are billed at hundreds of dollars. This is because now consumerism has mixed with the medical industry. She elaborates on how drugs that were inexpensive are now sky-rocketing in prices. For example, antibiotics in the 90s used to be about $10. In 2007, these same antibiotics cost about $100. In the United States, medical bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcy.

In our contemporary society, people are deprived of quality medical care due to circumstances that are hard for them to control. These circumstances such as socioeconomic status, resources, and access to healthcare leave a lot of the population’s health in jeopardy. However, when people are able to get to healthcare facilities especially super utilizers they may not be able to afford their medical bills. Super utilizers follow the 5-50 rule which means that even though they are 5% of the population accounting for 50% of the medical costs of the population in the United States. There should be an alternative method to help not only these people but for everyone else deprived of healthcare. I guess it’s up to our generation.