What of the health system and to demonstrate that there is an is notable about this statement is that Becker is one of the best-known members of the University of Chicago emerging consensus among reform-minded observers school, whose adherents are probably the quintessential about the direction that real reform must take. [...] Dramatic … the episodes such as the first trials of the polio vaccine in the 1950s are largely forgotten, while more recent discoveries - for example, that stomach ulcers can be treated with coverage of antibiotics rather than with a combination of buttermilk and surgery - though worthy of a Nobel Prize,1 have not redounded to the credit of the drug sector. [...] Drugs and Health Care Costs There are, inevitably, a number of ways to look at the issue of drugs and the cost of care. [...] That means, of course, that the cost savings attainable by substitu- …the use of tion will depend on the cost of the type of treatment being replaced. [...] The number of hospital bed days declines most all types of rapidly for those diagnoses with the greatest increase in the total number of drugs pre- scribed and the greatest change in the distribution of drugs.