If you're interested in US Healthcare, I can recommend "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care". I was surprised to

If you're interested in US Healthcare, I can recommend "The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care". I was surprised to learn that France, for example, has private doctors, private hospitals, and private insurance companies (gee, somehow thought they had 'socialized medicine'). It spends half what the US does per capita and is ranked #1 by the WHO (the US is ranked #37, just behind Costa Rica). How do the French do it? Well, it's not that hard. All other developed nations using the Bismarck Model (like the US, feel free to google that or any of this) have a few structural differences from the US. The first is a particularly obvious one: insurance companies are non-profit (though privately held and operated). Fees are entirely standardized and printed for all to see ("reference pricing", structurally like medicare/aid). Doctors and hospitals make a lot less money (Doctors drive volvos not porsches). Doctors don't pay for medical school. Claims are never denied. Doctors are rarely sued. Doctors are paid very quickly (3-14 days). I'm not making this up. In essence, the system squeezes all of its players to be as efficient as possible. In the US, the exact opposite is true. Most of the players are incentivized to drive costs up. A private FOR PROFIT insurance company (which no other developed nation allows) by definition wants to suck all the money it can from the system and pay none of it out (to wit: when an insurance company pays a claim, it is called a "medical loss"). Hospitals are in an arms raise of acquisitions (to better negotiate with insurance companies) and over-built, fancy facilities (to attract patients and justify the exorbitant costs). Doctors start their professional career by having to pay off huge student loans. Insurance companies, hospitals, and (to a much lesser extent) doctors collude, in effect, to steal money from all the other employers out there (in insurance premiums) and from patients (co-pays, denied claims, and an ever-growing number of out of pocket expenses). None of this is the fault of insurance companies, hospitals, or doctors. It is entirely the fault of our incompetent no-account and utterly failed political system. US healthcare is corrupt because the US political system is corrupt. To fix it, we need to fix that. Entrepreneurs cannot fix US healthcare in the current regulatory environment. The incentives are completely wrong. EDIT: added a missed "system" after a "political". EDIT2: I forget to mention the most relevant piece. The French, since 1998, have had 'La Carte Vitale'. It is an electronic medical record they carry around with them. Every doctor's office has a reader. It is a government standard, government owner, and government operated. Epic makes money by _NOT_ sharing its data if it can get away with it. Switching costs are its friend. It's called 'vendor lock in' and its why the government should be doing this small piece of it. It's like building an interstate highway. It lets commerce happen.