Following his father’s unnecessary death from a hospital-acquired infection at the age of 83, David Goldhill, president and CEO of the Game Show Network, began a personal examination of the U.S. health care system. It has had a broader impact, than perhaps even he anticipated.
It began with Goldhill writing about his father’s health care experience in a 2009 article for The Atlantic. That article then led to his authoring a book, Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father—And How We Can Fix It, which was released in the U.S. earlier this year.
It also led to a discussion of Goldhill’s findings at HMS with Ashish Jha, HMS associate professor of medicine and Harvard School of Public Health professor of health policy and management, in a provocative, spirited interview on March 1, 2013. HMS Dean Jeffrey S. Flier introduced the program.
“How is it possible that an institution dedicated to life-and-death care could be so careless?” Goldhill asked the crowd gathered at the Armenise Auditorium, adding that he did not believe his father’s death was attributable to a failure of caring or morals.
Goldhill noted that 100,000 patients die each year from easily preventable hospital-acquired infections like the one that killed his father. Following a simple checklist would practically eliminate such infections, he said, but many hospitals have yet to adopt the basic reforms necessary to prevent deaths related to these infections.
The problem is structural and economic, according to Goldhill, because the health care consumer is not the health care customer. Instead, Medicare, Medicaid and the insurance companies who pay the bills are the customers, he said, and the system is not set up to meet the needs of the patient.
Goldhill said there is no single solution for the complicated challenge of how to pay for all the different kinds of things that currently fall under the umbrella of health care, and that likely solutions could include combinations of catastrophic care insurance, health savings accounts, and a wholesale rethinking of who the health care system serves.
Another important part of the solution could come from reducing the incentives to medicalize problems that might be better treated in other ways, he said, adding that many important improvements for the health of Americans could likely be found outside the health care system, in social, dietary and behavioral changes.
