From the New York Times bestselling author, Marty Makary, comes an eye-opening, timely, urgent critique of America’s broken healthcare system and the change agents working to fix it.
One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising healthcare costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation’s leading healthcare experts, travels across America and details why healthcare has become a financial crisis. Using vivid stories and original research, Dr. Makary explains how a new business model of price gouging, middlemen, and a series of elusive money games is in need of a serious shake-up. He shows how so much of healthcare spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary also untangles medical bills that are so confusing most doctors can’t interpret them and challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine’s noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable.
The Price We Pay offers a roadmap for everyday Americans as well as business leaders to get a better deal on their healthcare, and looks at the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well–a mission that can lower costs and save our country from the crushing cost of the medical industrial complex.
Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H., is a Johns Hopkins surgeon and a leading health care expert. He is a prominent voice for patients writing for The Wall Street Journal and USA Today and has published over 250 scientific research articles focusing on health care costs, quality science, and vulnerable populations. Dr. Makary was the lead researcher of landmark articles introducing the surgical checklist, later adopted by the W.H.O., frailty and its role in predicting of surgical outcome, a survey to measure hospital safety culture, and contributions to the field of surgery. At the W.H.O., Dr. Makary led the technical workgroup on measuring surgical
quality worldwide and served in leadership with Atul Gawande on the W.H.O. Surgery Checklist committee—work that later became disseminated in the book The Checklist Manifesto. He has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine and named to one of America’s 40 smartest people in health care by Becker’s Review. He lives in the Washington DC area.
Praise for:
“Over the course of decades, American ‘healthcare’ lost the care component and devolved to a big, wasteful business. In The Price We Pay, Makary undertakes an extensive listening tour and astutely deconstructs how this occurred and what we need to do about it.”
—Eric Topol, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of Medscape on The Price We Pay