Fixing a Broken Health-Care System

From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "Healing the U.S. health care system: There's no easy cure," by Judith VandeWater--

Patients and doctors, business owners and working people, lawmakers and economists agree: The U.S. health care system's problems are so big, so tangled, that it's hard to know what to fix first. Tackle one issue, and another gains potency.

Technology, the great driver of health care costs, is also the driver of hope and cures. Escalating costs, in turn, have weakened the nation's work-based health system. Health insurance is out of reach for 45 million Americans, and experts predict their ranks will swell by 2 million a year for the foreseeable future.