Can We Restore the American Dream

If you’re like me, you’re always trying to find the best deals on your credit card, cable, and phone providers. That may mean calling up every 12 months to renegotiate annual contracts—or threatening to cancel. But for many people, the cost of putting in this time and effort is too high, so they just renew their annual plans without batting an eyelash.

Healthcare Contracts

And the same thing plays out in healthcare in corporate America—it’s often easier for companies—big and small—to accept the status quo and believe that the “savings” offered by their brokers are a good deal. But that leaves employees holding the short end of the stick.

Dave Chase dives into this ideology in his new book, The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream, where he takes a long, hard look at our flawed healthcare system. As he sees it, the 2 biggest problems in our healthcare system are

• pricing failure (no correlation between price and health outcomes) and
• overtreatment

Healthcare Financial Incentives

Our system’s financial incentives aren’t aligned with the outcomes we want, which most of us define as staying healthy in the first place and receiving high-quality care when we need it, while still being able to afford and live a satisfying life.

Simply put: we want to stay healthy, but the system is not designed to support or even offer this. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Chase really drives this point home in part two of the book:

Keep in mind that, while well over 80 percent of health-related spending goes to the “sick care” system, that system only drives 20 percent of health outcomes.

That’s where companies like BaseHealth come in: they are able to turn this ratio around and focus those precious dollars on the right population—those patients that desperately need medical intervention, but may not even know it. They call these the Invisible Patients, those who look healthy on paper—until they aren’t.

Throughout the book, Chase weaves in real-life examples and successes of top-performing companies who really take action on the time-old adage “our employees are our most valuable commodity” and are able to improve their spending by 20 percent or more while improving their employees’ health trajectories.

This book is a must-read for anyone looking to gain insight and understanding of what your health care funds are being spent on and how you can “deliver world-class healthcare to your employees at half the cost.”

Pick up your copy of The CEO’s Guide to Restoring the American Dream today.

You can also follow me here on medium, on twitter, or on   or Sign up to receive my posts each week