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

Dr. Vivian Lee has done a miraculous job in writing an easy to understand and very engaging book on the challenges facing the US health care system to ensure affordability, accessibility, and consistent high quality care. This is a must read for anyone wishing to understand how the US health care system got started, how did it become what it is today, and what is needed to make it better.Through and full of insightful perspectives from experts in health care from the public sector and private sector as well as memorable one-liner quotes and anecdotes, it ends each chapter asking each responsible party in health care - payers (insurers, employers), patients, physicians, health care providers, and policy makers, what each should do to enable a better future.I appreciate the enormous difficulty in explaining the US health care system that accounts for 1/5 of the US GDP and I also admire how masterfully Dr. Lee does so. It’s her unique perspective as a clinician, a researcher, a health care leader both at the academic medical center University of Utah Health and also technology company Verily that allows her to holistically see the US health care system as a whole from multiple perspectives and data points from the 30,000 foot level to that of individual doctor and patient encounter.I tell you, as someone who has been a patient advocate since 2004, as a primary care doctor since 2000, who has been fortunate enough to meet with and learn from extraordinary health care leaders and business leaders through my tenure at Kaiser Permanente, if there was only one book you had to read on the US health care system, this is the one to get you up to speed quickly with its candor about the current status quo and that offers the optimism and solutions of a better future only if we actively choose to do it - it is this book, the Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone.

Concise and fact based assessment of the problems and potential solutions for our suboptimal US healthcare system. Filled with helpful information and clear guidance.

Dr. Lee tackles one of the most complex and daunting challenges facing us: improving our health care system. Her views are supported by evidence and her range of understanding of clinical, macro/micro economic and political/social forces in play is impressive. Written for the total spectrum of readers from lay person to expert, she narrates with a wonderfully engaging voice that maintains the reader's interest across a comprehensive landscape of relevant issues. Dr. Lee has created an extremely engaging and interesting approach to get her points across, filled with entertaining references and to-dos for each stakeholder. Like many others have opined: this is a highly enjoyable and refreshing MUST read!

It's self-evident healthcare is an incredibly complex part of each of our lives. Both political parties agree something is fundamentally broken, though you will not hear good-faith arguments on how to improve it. The answers are hard, incentives are deeply entrenched and the major players in healthcare have little incentive to change how things are done. Dr. Vivian Lee mines the complexity and brings forward objectives and goals for stakeholders across healthcare, including the patient. If you're interested in easy answers, you'd be better off looking for magic beans and listening to politicians. This book holds a guide to the real work and the real payoff for the US Healthcare system to achieve better outcomes for less cost.

It is obvious that health care in America is broken; we spend significantly more than all developed countries on healthcare but our outcomes are among the worst of any developed nation. Many of the potential policy solutions that could potentially solve this problem become highly politicized and therefore have little chance of getting through a highly divided Congress. In "The Long Fix" Dr. Lee offers common-sense solutions to various problems with many of problems with the health care system that seem like they could win broad bipartisan approval. She also offers specific steps that each player in the health care system (patients, providers, policymakers) can take to advocate for better care. A must read for anyone who is interested in making the health care system better.

Whether you know nothing about the US healthcare system or have worked in the industry your entire career, there is something everyone can learn from this book. It is practical, optimistic and the stories are truly fascinating. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to learn about how healthcare is provided and paid for today and how we can make it better.