Restoring the American Dream by Reimagining Healthcare with Dave Chase: PYP 264

Plant Yourself - Embracing a Plant-based Lifestyle

Dave Chase is one of those quiet innovators who moves mountains through vision, energy, and sheer persistence. With a healthy dose of trickster energy in the mix...

Chase is one of the founders of Healthcare Rosetta, a non-profit dedicated to accelerating "adoption of simple, practical, non-partisan fixes to our healthcare system."

He was also CEO/Co-founder of Avado, a digital health company that was acquired by WebMD & Medscape.

Given the messed-up state of healthcare at the moment, Chase makes a startling claim: "Healthcare is already fixed." In other words, we know what works, and how to implement those fixes. On a small scale, everything that's needed is already in place somewhere. It's our job to publicize and scale those fixes until they change the entire system.

So if it's so easy, what's standing in our way? As Chase writes in his masterful and infuriating book, The CEO's Guide to Restoring the American Dream, only three trillion things. As in, the amount of money spent on healthcare in the US every year.

Much of that money, Chase argues, is misspent on ineffective and/or unnecessarily expensive treatments. The book is a handbook for CEOs who are desperately trying to reduce their organizations' healthcare costs, but it also reads like a crime thriller.

On page after page, I found myself shocked at the perverse incentives that reinforce a crooked system. One that costs lives, promotes suffering, and is literally stealing the American dream of middle class prosperity from an entire generation.

In our conversation, we covered:

• "we've gone to war for far less"
• the gut punch that inspired Dave to tackle healthcare
• at the bedside of a dying friend, watching the medical system "suck the life out of her medically and financially"
• having to do something, and not knowing what that was
• simultaneously discovering the overwhelming magnitude of the problem and that "every structural fix had already been invented and proven and replicated"
• the essential problem: we're not getting value from our healthcare spend
• 25 cents of every healthcare dollar goes to doctors and nurses - they aren't the problem
• where the money gets squandered
• half of the average millennial's lifetime earnings will go to healthcare
• the history of employer-sponsored health insurance (an artifact of a World War II-era law)
• Starbucks and Virginia Mason University study: 95% of all surgeries were unnecessary
• "we ration choices, not care"
• our badly undermined primary care system
• the unintended consequences of a well-meaning provision in the ACA
• every year, employees are asked to downgrade "from an iMac to a DOS-based healthcare plan"
• the stunningly high misdiagnosis rates in oncology
• the mission of Health Rosetta - to become the LEED certifying equivalent in the healthcare space
• The Big Heist mockumentary - aiming to catalyze a national moment of awakening
• Harris Rosen hotel company, an innovative approach to healthcare, and the community miracle in Florida
• Chase's next book on the opioid crisis: "every addict needs an enabler, and 11 out of 12 enablers are employers"
• and much more...