No cure for health care costs.

Byline: Jim Landers

Nov. 12--Patients, health economists and even some doctors agree: Our health care system is a breathtakingly expensive, bewildering mess.

"There are pockets of excellence," said Texas Health Resources vice president Mike Alverson. "But the way it's financed today, with employers paying most of the cost of insurance and with 46 million uninsured, a lot of people look at the American system and say it's untenable." One in four Texas residents has no health insurance. Parkland Hospital spent more than $410 million last year treating the uninsured. More than half a million Americans go abroad every year for affordable medical treatment in India, Thailand and other countries.

Health care costs are breaking budgets across the world, spurring cost-cutting ideas ranging from better information technology to rationing. But no one else spends as much as the United States, where health care absorbs $2.2 trillion a year, or more than 16 percent of the economy.

Dallas has become an incubator for companies and policy-makers with ideas about cheaper medicine. It has also become a cockpit of bickering and foot-dragging among insurers, data processing companies, hospitals and physicians who've argued fruitlessly about how to implement some of the cost-savings reforms at the top of the Bush administration's health care agenda. Consumers are losing patience. The Citizen's Health Care Working Group, a federally appointed expert panel, just…