Americans give over $300 billion to charity annually. One of the best tools developed over the past few decades to help facilitate this generosity is the rise of Donor Advised Funds (DAFs). The first DAFs were set up in the 1930s, but they did not become popular until financial services companies made them available to a mass market in the 1990s.

Why is it possible that so many working Americans can’t afford medical insurance coverage? The question presumes that Americans who choose not to have insurance coverage do so because they cannot afford it. This is the same mistake that policy makers crying that we have a “healthcare crisis” have made for decades.

Medical care is measured in quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). QALY measures how many years of additional life can be gained by any medical procedure. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has set the cost threshold of one year’s worth of quality life at $50,000.

Health care’s malignant growth is also a mushroom cloud caused by a lack of “negative feedback.” All systems require a regulator to dampen runaway reactions. Health care coverage is no exception. Most industries provide just the right amount of negative feedback by having the person who pays for a service, the person who benefits from the service and the person empowered to decide if the service should be provided in the first place be the same person.

With a third-party payer involved, health care providers don’t need to please their patients to get paid. They need to please their patient’s health insurance. If the insurance company isn’t satisfied, it isn’t going to pay. For this reason, hospital bills are generated with health insurance companies in mind. And health insurance companies, both public and private, have incentives to be difficult to please.

Why is our per capita health care cost so much higher than other nations that demonstrate superior health outcomes? Implicit in the question is the claim that health care quality can be judged by health outcomes. However, healthy outcomes have more to do with the population being measured than it does with the health care available.

Why are insurance companies reluctant to cover preventative care? The short answer is that screening tests rarely, if ever, save money. A screening test looks for a disease when the patient has no symptoms. And because of the lack of symptoms, nearly all of these tests offer no medical benefit.

“How can a hospital charge exorbitant fees for simple items that would cost a few bucks at CVS?” In other words, why would the hospital charge each new mother $100 for a $1 bedpan? The answer is found by examining the economics of the payment system and pseudo price controls found in the industry.

Dr. Michael Kirsch, a practicing physician and newspaper columnist, has lamented that there are questions he can never answer satisfactorily for his patients. Understanding the economics behind his first question, “Why are drugs in Canada so much cheaper than the same drugs purchased here?” should help everyone understand how legislation could improve the situation rather than making it worse.

The marketing people at Chipotle Mexican Grill have a new promotional idea called “cultivating thought.” They invited selected authors to write something designed to be read in two minutes. These pieces are printed on the sides of Chipotle takeout bags as well as drink cups.