This Element is an excerpt from Overhauling America's Healthcare Machine: Stop the Bleeding and Save Trillions (9780132173254) by Douglas A. Perednia. Available in print and digital formats.
Starting with the end in mind: a set of common sense, achievable goals for truly reforming the U.S. healthcare system
Our American healthcare machine was never planned with a specific result in mind: it evolved through tradition, politics, regulation, and rational responses to (sometimes perverse) incentives. So, if we’re really going to “reform” healthcare, we’d better decide what we’d like it to do. Here is a relatively short list of goals based upon common sense and the public good…
Dr. Douglas A. Perednia has been a medical internist, dermatologist, medical informatics researcher, healthcare entrepreneur, and creator of several non-profits. In the 1990s, he was principal investigator on digital imaging and telecommunications research projects for the National Cancer Institute and National Library of Medicine, and founded the Telemedicine Research Center. Later, he founded Kietra Corporation to develop versatile, low-cost technologies to improve patient care and reduce overhead. In 2007, he created U.S. Healthcare Constitution.org, a non-profit dedicated to injecting non-partisan reason, dialogue, and the “big picture” into America’s healthcare debate.