Explain what influences the cost of medical care, especially for chronic or terminal patients?

I'm not sure where you are in the book, thus, I have been able to find information, but I'm not sure if it is what you were looking for.

From the text:

While insurance in this country for cheap, effective preventative services is patchy at best, the coverage for high-cost, acute medical care is pretty close to a blanket. Hospitals are ethically and legally obliged to provide for patients who are acutely ill, regardless of insurance—care for the uninsured is paid out of a pool of funds from the insured, reimbursed at a higher rate and often bolstered by state funds. By the time a person is sick enough to wind up in the ICU, someone else is always footing the bill.

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Modern medical innovations have created an environment in which even seconds of life can have a considerable financial cost, but the cost at the end of life is always borne by others, and so frightened patients and rattled families have little incentive not to forge ahead, trying treatment after hopeless treatment. At present, these costly, compromised seconds are considered the right of every American. Meanwhile the modestly priced interventions that could add productive, pain-free years to millions of lives—for instance, better management of a chronic, epidemic disease like diabetes—are not.

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When families are involved, they agonize over decisions that often merely drag out the dying process by excruciating days or weeks. The information failures that plague health-care transactions throughout life only increase in magnitude and intensity as we approach the end.