Description
How did a health-care system built to serve patients become so expensive, fragmented, and difficult to navigate—and what would it take to put patients and clinicians back at its center?
For more than fifty-five years, health care policymaker, regulator, teacher, advocate and trusted advisor, John E. Diehl has worked within the legal and financial architecture of American medicine. In Saving American Health Care, he draws on that firsthand experience to trace how insurance, HMOs, managed care, regulation, corporate interests, and technology transformed the way Americans receive and pay for medical care.
Diehl argues that meaningful reform requires more than another financing scheme. It requires restoring six essential foundations of a successful health-care system: accessible and available services, quality, altruism, meaningful choice, information privacy, and individual autonomy.
Part history, part insider account, and part reform blueprint, Saving American Health Care explores what went wrong, why decades of reform have produced unintended consequences, and how stronger accountability, greater choice, protection of medical privacy, and renewed physician professionalism can help restore trust.
For patients, clinicians, policymakers, health-care leaders, and anyone wondering how American medicine reached this point, Diehl offers both a diagnosis—and a path forward.
