How American Healthcare Killed My Father: Q&A with David Goldhill

David Goldhill is the head of the Game Show Network – and one of
the most-lucid analysts and unforgiving critics of the American
health care system.

In this interview, produced by Reason TV’s Jim Esptein and
conducted by Kmele Foster, Goldhill talks about his must-read new
book,
Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father–and
How We Can Fix It, what’s wrong with Obamacare, and much
more. If you care about the future of medicine and insurance in
this country, watch this interview.

Released on Friday, November 1. Read the original writeup and
get more info by clicking below.

In 2007, David Goldhill’s father was admitted to a New York City
hospital with pneumonia, and five weeks later he died there from
multiple hospital-acquired infections. “I probably would have been
like any other family member dealing with the grief and disbelief,”
says Goldhill, a self-described liberal Democrat who is currently
the CEO of the Game Show Network. “But,” as Goldhill recounts,

A month later there was a
profile in The New Yorker of physician
Peter Provonost, who was running around the country with fairly
simple steps for cleanliness and hygiene that could significantly
reduce the hospital-acquired infection rate, but he was having a
hard time getting hospitals to sign up for this. I had helped run a
movie chain, and we had a rule that if a soda spilled, it had to be
cleaned up in five minutes or someone got in trouble. And I thought
to myself, if we can do that to get you not to go to the theater
across the street, why are hospitals having such a hard time doing
simple cost-free things to save lives?

That’s how Goldhill first got interested in the economics of the
American health care system. In 2009, he published a
much-discussed article in The
Atlantic, which he has now expanded into a book,
titled Catastrophic
Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father–and How We Can Fix
It.

Goldhill argues that the major problem in health care is a
system of incentives that puts most of the purchasing power in the
hands of insurance companies and the government, while cutting
patients out of the equation. This system isn’t just costing us a
lot of money, it’s killing us. As Goldhill explains, there’s a
direct link between the way we pay for health care and the
estimated 100,000 patients in the U.S. who die every year from
infections they picked up in hospital.

Reason TV Contributor Kmele Foster sat down with Goldhill to
discuss the problems in our health care system and why turning
patients back into customers will go a long way towards solving
them.

Produced, shot, and edited by Jim Epstein. Additional camera by
Anthony Fisher.

About 30 minutes.

Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe
to Reason TV’s
YouTube Channelto receive automatic updates when new material
goes live.