Consumer-Driven Health Care: Implications for Providers, Payers, and Policymakers

Harvard Business School professor Regina E. Herzlinger tackles a weighty topic with a weighty tome, serving as contributor and editor of an 892-page critique of worldwide health care systems that charge exorbitant prices, provide inadequate and fragmented care, abuse the consumer, and disenchant doctors. What went wrong? For Herzlinger, the reason is obvious: "Health care systems worldwide are guided by someone other than the consumer," namely bureaucrats, insurers, and technocrats. Part one, which Herzlinger wrote, offers a solution: Put consumers in the driver's seat. "Consumer control will reward innovative insurers and providers for creating the higher-quality, lower-cost services we want and deserve," she writes. "In this consumer-driven system, government will protect us with financial assistance and oversight, not micromanagement." Part two offers up seventy-two mostly short essays from medical professionals, business leaders, and academics that tackle diverse subjects from "Package Pricing at the Texas Heart Institute" to "Consumer-Driven Health Care for the Uninsured." Herzlinger, who has been advocating consumer power in health care since 1979, believes the time is ripe for the revolution. If so, this book is must reading for any business leader and policy maker touched by the health care industry—and that's about all of us.