My editor suggested that this was not the best opening paragraph to use when trying to convince you to buy this book. Nevertheless, when I think about the imperative we have to fix health care, I wonder what Rosa Parks had for breakfast on the day she made history.
I mean, did she start her day like any other over a bowl of cereal, thinking it was just another day? Or was she contemplating something bigger as she stared into her coffee cup that morning?
In the end, the details of her breakfast don’t matter. What matters is that she’d had enough. Enough of a system that diminished her, enough of rules that kept her in her “place.”
Her small but radical refusal to give up her seat sparked a movement that would change the course of history, culminating in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
In writing this book, I find myself wondering: where is the Rosa Parks’ moment for health care?
The Health Care Crisis
Like civil rights in the 1960s, health care today is one of the defining social and economic issues of our time. You don’t need a book to tell you that the American health care system is broken. You see it every day—in rising costs, declining health status, and the burnout of the very people who keep the system running.
And yet, we often approach changing health care as if it’s someone else’s job. We assume that the solution will come from policymakers, executives, or technology. But history tells us a different story. Change rarely comes from the top down. It starts with ordinary people taking small, meaningful actions.
This Book Is Different
Most books about health care reform do two things you will not find in this book. The first is to spend hundreds of pages assigning blame: insurance companies, hospital executives, pharmaceutical firms, government regulators—the list is endless.
The second thing most books on this topic do is serve as a platform for an author or organization to prescriptively tell you their view on how to “fix” the system.
This book is different. It doesn’t assign blame because the system’s dysfunction isn’t the fault of a single group or institution. Instead, it’s the result of deeply embedded flaws such as incentives and workflows that shape how we view, deliver and pay for health care. Blame won’t fix that. Understanding will.
And while I have my views on changing healthcare, you won’t find a prescription for fixing healthcare.
This is not a book about telling you what to think. It’s about helping you gain a better understanding of the underlying issues. More importantly, it’s about helping you discover or refine your own voice in keeping with your unique needs, values and experiences.
It’s about you—and every reader—realizing that your views and voice matter. They are the starting point for real change.
A Revolution Hidden in Plain Sight
This book is for those who want to change American health care from what it is to what they believe it should be.
It’s built on the idea that each of us has the power to take small, meaningful actions to transform health care. It emphasizes that creating change in the system isn’t a matter of talking but a matter of doing.
Which is where you come in.
Health care won’t fix itself. And it won’t be fixed by the people comfortable with the status quo. But it can be changed by individuals like you—patients, clinicians, business leaders, and everyday citizens—who refuse to accept the way things are and start imagining what they could be.
This book is for everyone whose life has been touched by the health care system:
Like Rosa Parks, within each of us is a spark of an idea to make our lives and the lives of others better. This book is about ordinary people taking small actions that collectively lead to the next social revolution.
Each of us has the power to say “enough.” And when enough of us do, the system will have no choice but to change.
T.