I Shed My White Coat to Find the Healthcare Bloat A lot has gone wrong and more money won't fix it

Over the last two years, I traveled to 22 cities. I took a deep dive into why healthcare costs so much. With a seasoned journalism professor mentoring me by phone almost every night, I traveled to meet with hospital executives and start-ups companies, doctors and insurance executives, nurses and state legislators, rural hospitals and big pharma, and most importantly, patients.

As a fan of the modern-day civil rights leader Bryan Stevenson, I have admired his message that in order to address social issues, we need to be proximate to the problem. So I decided to apply the same approach to understand the business of medicine. I shed my white coat and embarked on a reporting trip across the country.