Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care

Why is America’s health care system so dysfunctional and expensive? Why do hospitalized patients receive bills laden with inflated charges that come out of the blue from out-of-network providers, or that demand payment for services that weren’t delivered? Why do we pay $600 for EpiPens that contain a dollar’s worth of medicine? Why is more than $1 trillion—one out of every three dollars that passes through the system—lost to fraud, wasted on services that don’t help patients, or otherwise misspent?

In a new book published by the Cato Institute, Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care, Cato adjunct scholars Charles Silver and David Hyman answer these questions. Overcharged shows how government replaces competition and consumer choice with monopolies and third-party payment, making America’s health care system as expensive as possible.