Harold S. Luft

Harold S. Luft, PhD, is Director of the Palo Alto Medical Foundation Research Institute and Caldwell B. Esselstyn Professor Emeritus of Health Policy and Health Economics and former Director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California San Francisco. He received his degrees in economics from Harvard University. His research has covered HMOs, hospital competition, volume, quality and outcomes of hospital care, risk assessment and risk adjustment, and health care reform. An elected member of the Institute of Medicine, he served on its Council, that of the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research, and the Board of AcademyHealth. He was co-editor of the journal Health Services Research. Author or editor of five books and over 200 articles in scientific journals, his Total Cure: The Antidote to the Health Care Crisis, was published by Harvard University Press in October 2008.

"I've spent my adult life trying to understand how the health care system works--and why it doesn't work as well as it could. Over the last four years I developed a proposal that is markedly different from everything else under discussion. I begin with the health care system we have and our American values, Constitution, and politics. The proposal uses incentives and builds on choice; it forces no one to be a loser.

To transform our current dysfunctional system, I describe more appropriate roles for both market incentives and government. This comprehensive proposal enhances coverage and quality and simultaneously reduces cost escalation."