Doctors were told to be blind to the cost of care

He counts four wounds in American medicine. Patients rarely bring up the first one, which is what health care costs. Narinder Singh Parhar is a physician with more than three decades in internal medicine, hospital medicine, and intensive care. This episode is based on his article "Health care affordability is now a moral crisis [https://kevinmd.com/2026/06/health-care-affordability-is-now-a-moral-crisis.html]," published on KevinMD. A retired Korean War veteran had Medicare, a supplemental plan, and a lifetime of work behind him. He still could not fill a $500 prescription near the end of the year. Narinder argues that spending has piled up in hospitals, imaging, procedures, and specialty care while primary care and the basic work of keeping people well go underfunded. He is blunt about the profession's part in it, saying physicians were taught to be blind to what care costs. You will hear him walk through the ordinary decisions where that shows up: the generic, the office biopsy, the shoulder MRI. He closes with a take-home for physicians that starts somewhere unexpected, with their own health. This episode is brought to you by ModMed [https://www.modmed.com/]. Welcome to your new AI-Powered Practice from ModMed. We're transforming specialty care by embedding AI Assistants across your entire workflow. Our all-in-one platform of EHR, patient engagement, practice management, and RCM helps reduce repetitive work while keeping you firmly in control. Trained on de-identified data from nearly a billion patient encounters, this isn't just smarter software. It's a new way of working for specialty medicine, more efficient and more connected to the patient experience. Start building your AI-Powered Practice at modmed.com [https://www.modmed.com/]. VISIT SPONSOR → https://www.modmed.com/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST → https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast