The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone

It may not be a quick fix, but this concrete action plan for reform can create a less costly and healthier system for all.

Beyond the outrageous expense, the quality of care varies wildly, and millions of Americans can’t get care when they need it. This is bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for business.

In The Long Fix, physician and health care CEO Vivian S. Lee, MD, cuts to the heart of the health care crisis. The problem with the way medicine is practiced, she explains, is not so much who’s paying, it’s what we are paying for. Insurers, employers, the government, and individuals pay for every procedure, prescription, and lab test, whether or not it makes us better―and that is both backward and dangerous.

Dr. Lee proposes turning the way we receive care completely inside out. When doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are paid to keep people healthy, care improves and costs decrease. Lee shares inspiring examples of how this has been done, from physicians’ practices that prioritize preventative care, to hospitals that adapt lessons from manufacturing plants to make them safer, to health care organizations that share online how much care costs and how well each physician is caring for patients.

Using clear and compelling language, Dr. Lee paints a picture that is both realistic and optimistic. It may not be a quick fix, but her concrete action plan for reform―for employers and other payers, patients, clinicians, and policy makers―can reinvent health care, and create a less costly, more efficient, and healthier system for all.

Vivian S. Lee, MD, PhD, MBA, has been a practicing physician, scientist, and health care administrator for more than two decades. Now president of health platforms at Verily (Alphabet’s health company), she divides her time between Boston, New York, and San Francisco.