Ten years ago, in a cover story on the "Plight of the American Patient," TIME noted with alarm that a typical American hospital charged $60 a day for a room, more than many resort hotels. The price has since doubled or even tripled, and this week's cover story examines the epidemic that has made health care far more expensive than national defense.

"The roots of medical inflation are tangled and diverse," says Assistant Managing Editor Ronald Kriss, who edited the report. "They lie not only in economics but also in politics and medical technology." To diagnose the case, Kriss assembled a team of writers with expertise in all three fields. Senior Writer George Church relied on his 24 years' experience as a business journalist to untangle the economics of the health care system, an industry that employs more than 3 million people. Senior Writer Ed Magnuson, a veteran political analyst, examined the complex issues and divergent proposals behind the health care debate in Congress. Anastasia Toufexis, a reporter for a physicians' newspaper before joining TIME as a Medicine section writer last year, described the intricacies of CAT scanners, coronary bypass surgery and other medical innovations that are as expensive as they are sophisticated.

In Washington, Correspondent Eileen Shields found that reporting the story required expertise in all three subjects, but especially one she happens to have mastered. A New York-based business reporter for four years, Shields was assigned last year to cover HEW. "I thought I left economics reporting behind," she says. "But the health care story, with its barrage of statistics and efficiency rating figures, is as much about business as anything else." The story also required healthy feet. Shields loped through the labyrinthine corridors of the HEW building, lurked about the halls of Congress and made several trips to the White House. She interviewed HEW Secretary Joseph Califano, Senator Edward Kennedy, health industry lobbyists and Congressmen for and against the Administration's medical care bill. She tracked down volumes of studies always revealing, she says, "that costs have risen again." Concludes Shields: "It's a challenging, almost intractable problem, and with next year's election ahead, it won't just fade away."

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