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Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—and How We Can Fix It (2013)

by David Goldhill(Favorite Author)

3.81 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0307961540 (ISBN13: 9780307961549)

languge

English

genre

Nonfiction

publisher

Knopf

review 1: I'd despaired of ever understanding why and how the American system of health care turned into such a disaster. But Goldhill does a brilliant job of making that clear. Better still, he has a persuasive vision of the path to regaining safe, innovative, customer-friendly, and comprehensive medical care. We'll never get there until most Americans begin to understand the dynamics that he illuminates, but this book provides a great start to such understanding.
review 2: Most of us have had horrible run-ins with our health care system. The author certainly has! But instead of grinning and bearing it, he actually has a prescription. It won't make any side of the current debate happy, and it may in fact be out of our societal political reach. In a nutshell, He was to ... morerelegate insurance and insurance companies to a universal, very high deductible status. He want all routine and chronic medicine to be left to the pressures of the market, so that competition can lower prices and increase quality and safety. And he wants all of us to have a HSA with mandatory funding of about $8500/yearly. And He wants a government of quasi government lending function, secured by our HSA balance (and future balance since is is mandatory) to lend us any money we need before the High Deductible Insurance kicks in. It sounds like a long term improvement is our totally dysfunctional system to me, but the Insurance companies are not going to take this lying down, nor our their 'bought' politicians. Also, there may be a little more faith in the free market than is warranted. (Unless we started enforcing anti-trust laws again and maybe regulate the advertising barrage, and set standards of care that are mandatory). His transition actually involves a gradual work-in to this plan, beginning with the young. Current Medicare would stay on the existing schema. His plans for those that cannot afford care are maybe the weakest part of his system (calling for load forgiveness for example) I enjoyed this volume. This is a real problem, and the author actually has an 'out of the box' proposal for a solution. I just wish I though it could be taken seriously by those in authority. less

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