Healthcare’s Black Holes

If you are anything like me, you were transfixed by last week’s first-ever photographs of an actual black hole. If you somehow missed the coverage, I urge you to take time to read about it, such as here or here. And if this accomplishment holds no interest for you, then you’re probably not going to be interested in this article either, although it is about healthcare’s metaphorical black holes rather than honest-to-goodness black holes.

Black holes were an unintended consequence of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. He published it in 1916, and soon after that one sharp reader — Karl Schwarzschild — found that its equations called for areas of space in which gravity was so strong that not even...