David Goldhill, CEO of the and author of the September 2009 Atlantic titled How American Health Care Killed My Father and book titled, Catastrophic Care – How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It, recently responded to my post – Malcolm Gladwell and David Goldhill Interview on Health Care – Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening His comments in his entirety: While I’m appreciative that you came to hear Malcolm and I discuss health care, you really don’t seem to understand much of what we were talking about. My work is an attempt to think about health care as an industry, and using comparisons to how other industries behave to understand why health care delivers such mixed performance — with extraordinarily high rates of error — at such high cost. My argument is a systemic one: bad industrial outcomes are a result of badly structured economic incentives; […] Read More »
Category Archives: Healthcare Crisis
David Goldhill Replies to My Post “Disappointing, Dangerous, Frightening” on His Interview on Healthcare
Posted on May 9, 2013
Why This Family Doctor Blogs and Writes – The Thrifty Patient
Posted on March 24, 2013
As a doctor, I am compelled to write because of what I know is occurring with alarming frequency in our country. Americans are skipping needed and recommended care that could save their lives and allow them to live to their fullest. Patients are more distracted, as life is more complicated and busier than ever. Households have both parents working, sometimes two jobs, just to make ends meet. They easily would make the right choice if someone would be willing to explain things in a simple, understandable manner. They would prefer a health care system that was so incredibly simple to use, convenient, and personalized that it would anticipate their needs so they could get the right care and get back to living life. Instead, our health care system offers patients higher co-pays, deductibles, and out-of-pocket medical expenses. It shifts the burden of making the right choices to people who frankly […] Read More »
Is David Goldhill Fix For Health Care Right?
Posted on March 12, 2013
First I believe our health care system must be better so I’m always curious to hear how others might propose to fix it. I recently had the opportunity to listen in two conversations with businessman David Goldhill about how healthcare might be made better. Goldhill lost his father to a hospital acquired infection and witnessed multiple errors during his hospitalization which compelled him to write not only a piece in the September 2009 Atlantic titled How American Health Care Killed My Father, but also a new book titled, Catastrophic Care: Why Everything We Think We Know about Health Care Is Wrong (Vintage). The first conversation was with New Yorker writer and best selling author Malcolm Gladwell. The second with Professor Ashish Jha, MD, MPH of Harvard medical school and Harvard School of Public Health. Does his solution offer the right prescription? Maybe. Maybe not. As a practicing primary care doctor passionate […] Read More »
Do I Need a Primary Care Doctor? The Quarterback of Your Medical Team.
Posted on December 12, 2012
Assembling the right medical team is important to keeping you healthy and saving money. Besides you, one of the most important people on this team is your regular doctor. For many people, this is their primary care physician (PCP) or primary medical doctor (PMD). A highly trained and well-qualified primary care doctor can advise you on what preventive tests and treatments are truly necessary to stay healthy. If you view your primary care doctor as a person to simply get referrals from to get better care, think again. One health insurance plan focused on having patients see primary care doctors first to help them figure out how to proceed. Without primary care doctors helping patients, 60 percent of the time patients chose the wrong specialist. Selecting the wrong doctor wasn’t the only issue. On average, $1,500 was spent on various tests and diagnostic services visits over an eleven-month period before […] Read More »
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