Source: The Weekly Standard
Patients, providers, employers, and employees are all trapped in a dysfunctional healthcare system fraught with perverse incentives that raise costs, reduce quality, and make care less accessible. Now Priceless cuts through the politics and proposes dozens of bold reforms for the new Healthcare Contract with America to free patients and caregivers to be empowered to chart their own lives with low-cost, high-quality healthcare.
“I have been following John Goodman’s health policy ideas for as long as I’ve been on Capitol Hill. . . . Priceless makes it abundantly clear why he is a source of wisdom, insight, and innovative thinking.”
—Paul Ryan, Chairman, House Budget Committee
“John Goodman has long been the clearest and most insightful healthcare thinker . . . . it’s time we acted on his common sense, fact-based wisdom in Priceless.”
—Mitch Daniels, Governor of Indiana
From the Publisher
In the groundbreaking book Priceless, John C. Goodman reveals how healthcare is a “complex system” that cannot be managed from the top down. True reform requires liberating doctors and patients by allowing them to interact in innovative ways to help meet unique individual medical needs.
The most important problems that plague American healthcare arise because we are trapped. Virtually all of us—patients, doctors, caregivers, employers, employees, etc.—are locked into a system fraught with perverse incentives that raise the cost of healthcare, reduce its quality, and make care less accessible than it should be.
Unfortunately, conventional thinking about how to fix those problems is marred by two false beliefs. The first is the idea that to make healthcare accessible it must be free at the point of delivery. The second is the idea that to make health insurance fair, premiums should not reflect real risks. Both ideas are the reason no one ever faces a real price for anything in the medical marketplace.
Goodman demonstrates how these and other false beliefs have eliminated normal market forces from American healthcare, making it almost impossible to solve problems the way they are solved in other markets. Relying on a common-sense understanding of how markets work, Goodman offers an unconventional diagnosis that allows him to think outside the box and propose dozens of bold reforms that would liberate patients and caregivers from the trap of a third-party payment system that stands in the way of affordable, high-quality healthcare.