Lifestyle: Health-care costs: Technology to the rescue? The medical establishment encourages only those new tools that it controls while impeding the implementation of systems that could minimize doctor and hospital costs

Although there has been a dramatic reduction in deaths from infectious diseases in the last 80 years and though steady gains have been made in containing killer diseases like cancer and heart disease, health care in the United States is falling victim to runaway costs. It has become so expensive that in certain areas of the country the infant mortality rate, due to poverty and limited access to health-care facilities, is still no better than in some undeveloped countries. High costs threaten to undo years of steady progress on the medical front.