Catastrophic Care

Angered by his father's death in 2007 from infections caught in a well-regarded New York hospital, and by Medicare's payment of the bill of several hundred thousand dollars, David Goldhill set out to understand how such carelessness could be rewarded in full. He describes an American health care system that costs nearly $2.5 trillion a year, bars many from treatment, offers inconsistent quality and negligible customer service, and where errors kill an estimated 200,000 Americans each year. His central target is the assumption that insurance and Medicare lower the cost of care and make people healthier. He proposes a comprehensive new approach that would give patients a real role in the process. It was published in 2013.

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley named it as the book he would read on health care.