Costlier care is often worse care. The morning sun is warm. The streets are lined with palm trees and pickup trucks. McAllen has another distinction, too: it is one of the most expensive health-care markets in the country. Only Miamiβwhich has much higher labor and living costsβspends more per person on health care. In , Medicare spent fifteen thousand dollars per enrollee here, almost twice the national average. The income per capita is twelve thousand dollars.
In other words, Medicare spends three thousand dollars more per person here than the average person earns. The explosive trend in American medical costs seems to have occurred here in an especially intense form. In Washington, the aim of health-care reform is not just to extend medical coverage to everybody but also to bring costs under control. Spending on doctors, hospitals, drugs, and the like now consumes more than one of every six dollars we earn.
The financial burden has damaged the global competitiveness of American businesses and bankrupted millions of families, even those with insurance.
McAllen, Texas, the most expensive town in the most expensive country for health care in the world, seemed a good place to look for some answers. And the Tex-Mex diet has contributed to a thirty-eight-per-cent obesity rate. One day, I went on rounds with Lester Dyke, a weather-beaten, ranch-owning fifty-three-year-old cardiac surgeon who grew up in Austin, did his surgical training with the Army all over the country, and settled into practice in Hidalgo County.
He has not lacked for business: in the past twenty years, he has done some eight thousand heart operations, which exhausts me just thinking about it. I walked around with him as he checked in on ten or so of his patients who were recuperating at the three hospitals where he operates. It was easy to see what had landed them under his knife. They were nearly all obese or diabetic or both. Many had a family history of heart disease. Few were taking preventive measures, such as cholesterol-lowering drugs, which, studies indicate, would have obviated surgery for up to half of them.
