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This week on “The Cost of Care” Venice Haynes and Meredith Shockley-Smith join David to talk broadly about social determinants and why black babies are twice as likely to die than white babies. David also speaks to Marquisse Watson – a mother whose baby girl Alana was born premature and passed away 36 hours after she was born – about working through her grief seven years later.

The health care system is basically a lucrative game of tug-of-war – and the winner reaps a trillion dollar pot of gold. But is it a fair game? This week on “The Cost of Care,” David explores the monstrous fee-for service system and how the results can lead to a total system breakdown with Dr. Vivian Lee and Dr. Jill Gross.

This week, David talks to Dr. Ashish Jha, Dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, about how a mother and nurse at Dignity Health, a Catholic hospital, ended up with a $1.7 million dollar bill for the birth of her premature baby girl.

This week, David and his guests talk about surprise billing, and how many patients are too afraid to walk through providers’ doors for fear of going into unnecessary debt.

With some help from an economic historian and a health care journalist, David goes back to the 1900s to find out how we ended up outspending other countries for five years less of life.