Medary.com

Megan McArdle (via Instapundit):

Everyone in the healthcare debate is looking for a villain: heedless consumers, careless doctors, grasping pharma companies. But the truth is, most of the increase in health care costs comes from new treatments, not abuse of the system. And a lot of those new treatments raise a question: how much are we willing to pay for marginal improvements in survival, or quality of life?

I don't know how much of the cost increase is due to the new treatments, vs. artificial price controls via Medicare, but certainly things like CT scans which didn't exist thirty or forty years ago add to the total cost of medical care we're paying today.