Strong Medicine - Hardcover

Americans spend $900 billion a year on health care. That's more than enough dollars to ensure high-quality care for every citizen. Why aren't we getting it? And what can we do about it?

In this plainspoken book, George Halvorson cuts to the heart of our health system's failure: the incentives we offer doctors, hospitals, and insurers.

We pay for procedures, not outcomes; we reward providers for what they do -- whether it is effective or not -- instead of for improving patient health.

The result is the most wasteful, complex, redundant health care system in the world, where as much as 25 percent of all procedures performed are unnecessary.George Halvorson argues convincingly that if we want to change our system we don't need more government regulation, greater expenditure, or health care rationing. Instead, we need the right incentives. If we reward quality and efficiency, the health care system in this country will turn itself around to provide them.

George Halvorson has spent twenty-five years on the front lines of health care. He has been president of an insurance company and a senior officer at Blue Cross & Blue Shield. Today, he manages one of the country's largest and most successful managed care organizations.

This lively, readable book combines the truths and eye-opening examples he has gathered on the job with the best research and thinking on health care today. It offers proposals for reform that are readily achievable and that will ensure better-quality. care for all Americans.