[Regardsyjc]

Are there any books you could recommend to learn more about why the American healthcare is a mess, how it became this way, as well as comparisons with other healthcare systems and why they work.

Could a PMR system help with some of these issues? Giving patients access to their records making it easier to aggregate data abiding with HIPAA?

I recently saw an episode of Dirty Money on Valeant. Is Valeant a good representation for most pharma companies and also a reflection of most for profit medical businesses whose primary obligation is to increase shareholder value?

What would be the best way to start aggregating and comparing prices in the USA? If it isn't possible, why do prices vary so much?

[hunter23]

Sorry can't recommend any books. The main reason US healthcare is a mess is because we have structured it to be a free market system when it lacks the key characteristics for a free market to work. Free markets work really well in some areas (say groceries stores) and would work terrible in others areas (a national military) See: http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/2/PHCBP.pdf

Patient medical records won't help with pricing issues, but data transparency would help with automated solutions to manage care.

There is no easy way to aggregate and compare prices. If you could get billions of health care claims then you could build algorithms to estimate pricing or perhaps you could convince the large health care companies to share their pricing with you (highly unlikely). Prices very widely because there each institution negotiates their own set of prices with a specific set of providers. Basically imagine your health care plan is basically a set of discount codes for a set of doctors and providers. Except those discount codes are never shared with you and vary for each doctor and each provider and can change at any time.