American Healthcare Reform: Fixing the Real Problems

Meaningful healthcare reform requires understanding of our complex healthcare system. This book was written to help clarify the difficult and poorly understood issues and problems of American healthcare. Its purpose is to help us move forward on the many difficult decisions that should be made to improve our healthcare system. Our unique combination of public-private funding and free-market capitalism system has been a major source of medical care advancements over the last half-century. The entrepreneurial spirit of risk takers who have invested billions of dollars to push forward innovative ideas and products has been key to its success. We should not lose that driving force for medical advancements and our economy. Our American healthcare system needs reform. We should fix it rationally with a scalpel, not destroy it with a meat cleaver. To optimize and appropriately guide that reform, we should first understand and concentrate on the real problems. Primarily we should fix our healthcare system by decreasing its administrative complexity and inefficiencies. The Affordable Care Act should be modified significantly to make it more acceptable as part of our national effort for more meaningful reform. Rational solutions through political compromises are not easy to find in our highly polarized political environment. It will be a long uphill climb, but it is a challenge that we must meet for our uniquely American healthcare system to survive.

Dr. Earl W. Ferguson, MD, PhD, Col USAF MC (Retired) is a healthcare executive, cardiologist, and preventive medicine specialist with a major interest in cardiovascular imaging, telemedicine, telehealth, telecommunications and computer applications to healthcare. He is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology, the American College of Physicians and the American College of Preventive Medicine. He is CEO of Sun BioMedical Technologies that he and his wife, Sun Hye Paik, PhD, DPharm, founded in 2002 for research on inflammatory diseases, including early, undetected atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. He is coordinating development of a Cardiovascular Imaging and Coronary Artery Risk Evaluation (CARE) Programs at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital and Coordinated Cardiovascular Care in the high desert region of Southern California. He provides cardiology consults to Ridgecrest Regional Hospital and its Rural Health Clinic. He also provides telemedicine consults to remote areas of the high desert of California and remotely monitors patients with pacemakers and automated implantable cardiac defibrillators. He is Medical Director, National Rural Accountable Care Organization, and Executive Director of the Southern Sierra Telehealth Network established in 2001. He has served on numerous boards, including the California State Rural Healthcare Association, California Broadband Cooperative (Digital 395 Project), California Telehealth Network, California Health Information Partnership & Services Organization, Ridgecrest Regional Hospital, and National Space Biomedical Research Institute External Advisory Council. He was on the Editorial Board, Telemedicine and eHealth Journal for almost two decades. Dr. Ferguson was a member of the Federal Senior Executive Service as the Director of Aerospace Medicine and Occupational Health for NASA before moving to Ridgecrest in 1996 to develop advanced rural health information technolog