Getting to the Cause of Death

Ezra Klein makes a reading recommendation:

For a more vivid look at the importance of medical practices in lowering health-care costs and improving health-care quality, read this amazing article on the power of autopsies, and why we should be upset that hospitals have largely stopped conducting them. That we prefer to spend a lot of money to conduct MRIs and other expensive scans, despite their often dubious utility, rather than a little money to conduct autopsies, despite their frequently fantastic payoffs, is the sort of thing that both drives our health-care costs and rarely gets talked about when we’re discussing policy solutions.

I would just guess that hospitals don't want to tell people they want to do an autopsy because that only reinforces in the family's mind that the hospital doesn't know why somebody in their care died, besides the fact that a lot of people would find it intrusive and disturbing to have the hospital dissecting grandma.  I would imagine that a ton could be learned from autopsies, but that the general public just isn't into it.