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The Coming Healthcare Revolution: 10 Forces that Will Cure America's Health Crisis
352 pages, Hardcover
Published November 13, 2024
About the author
David Johnson
666 books30 followersThere is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base. For the author of the Tucker series, see https://www.goodreads.com/author/show...
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
August 10, 2025
David Johnson is the founder and CEO of Foresight Health, with degrees in English and public policy. Paul Kusserow is the former CEO and current chairman of Amedisys, a large provider of home health and hospice service. Neither is a physician, and both come from the administrative/policy side of the industry.
Johnson and Kusserow's 2025 book The Coming Healthcare Revolution: Ten Forces That Will Cure America’s Health Crisis aims to describe a tectonic shift in U.S. healthcare, from the entrenched fee-for-service model to a value-based care system focused on prevention, wellness, and long-term outcomes.
Unsurprisingly for a book written by healthcare administrators vs. practitioners, this is written from the top down, with emphasis on system-level incentives, payment models, and macroeconomic forces. As someone who works in the trenches of an academic medical center, and whose daily reality involves operating inside a financially unsustainable business model, I found myself wishing for more representation of the ground-level clinician perspective. This lack of perspective was especially glaring when the authors shared first-hand experiences of their frustration in schedule their own healthcare appointments - a great example of high-level railing against a problem but not really understanding why it's that way because you don't truly understand how the system works.
The authors’ core argument - that value-based care is the future and that well care should outweigh sick care - is neither controversial nor new. The book is dense with data and charts, but the presentation feels more suited to a policy briefing than an engaging read. And while the macroeconomic case for change is well-outlined, the threats and pressures most relevant to my specialty barely register here. In my practice, reimbursement for high complexity, expensive testing and the sustainability of this testing being available at the same venues where healthcare is delivered (vs. being outsourced to the commercial sector) are our main challenges; these challenges are, unsurprisingly, absent from these “ten forces.”
I received a complimentary copy after hearing one of the authors speak at a healthcare conference earlier this year. My impression then matches my impression now: this is a book that will resonate most with administrators, policymakers, and consultants, and less so with clinicians (particularly subspecialists) who spend their careers in direct patient care or clinical operations.
In the end, this is one more title in the ever-growing “the system is broken and here’s how to fix it” category, published primarily to serve the authors' egos and add credibility to their résumés. If you’ve read other healthcare reform books, you won’t find much new here.
Further reading: similar books by MDs
The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone by Vivian Lee, MD
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter, MD
The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, MD, and Jason Hwang, MD
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Eric Topol, MD
My statistics:
Book 248 for 2025
Book 2174 cumulatively
Johnson and Kusserow's 2025 book The Coming Healthcare Revolution: Ten Forces That Will Cure America’s Health Crisis aims to describe a tectonic shift in U.S. healthcare, from the entrenched fee-for-service model to a value-based care system focused on prevention, wellness, and long-term outcomes.
Unsurprisingly for a book written by healthcare administrators vs. practitioners, this is written from the top down, with emphasis on system-level incentives, payment models, and macroeconomic forces. As someone who works in the trenches of an academic medical center, and whose daily reality involves operating inside a financially unsustainable business model, I found myself wishing for more representation of the ground-level clinician perspective. This lack of perspective was especially glaring when the authors shared first-hand experiences of their frustration in schedule their own healthcare appointments - a great example of high-level railing against a problem but not really understanding why it's that way because you don't truly understand how the system works.
The authors’ core argument - that value-based care is the future and that well care should outweigh sick care - is neither controversial nor new. The book is dense with data and charts, but the presentation feels more suited to a policy briefing than an engaging read. And while the macroeconomic case for change is well-outlined, the threats and pressures most relevant to my specialty barely register here. In my practice, reimbursement for high complexity, expensive testing and the sustainability of this testing being available at the same venues where healthcare is delivered (vs. being outsourced to the commercial sector) are our main challenges; these challenges are, unsurprisingly, absent from these “ten forces.”
I received a complimentary copy after hearing one of the authors speak at a healthcare conference earlier this year. My impression then matches my impression now: this is a book that will resonate most with administrators, policymakers, and consultants, and less so with clinicians (particularly subspecialists) who spend their careers in direct patient care or clinical operations.
In the end, this is one more title in the ever-growing “the system is broken and here’s how to fix it” category, published primarily to serve the authors' egos and add credibility to their résumés. If you’ve read other healthcare reform books, you won’t find much new here.
Further reading: similar books by MDs
The Long Fix: Solving America's Health Care Crisis with Strategies that Work for Everyone by Vivian Lee, MD
The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter, MD
The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care by Clayton Christensen, Jerome Grossman, MD, and Jason Hwang, MD
The Creative Destruction of Medicine: How the Digital Revolution Will Create Better Health Care by Eric Topol, MD
My statistics:
Book 248 for 2025
Book 2174 cumulatively
January 26, 2025
I've read books on reforming the U.S. health care system by creating a European-style national health care system. I've read one book on how the Singaporean health system, often rated in the top 10 on the planet, is the one the US was going to use before Truman was convinced to leave health care a benefit of employment.
This is the first time I've read a book (written by doctors) that purports that the US healthcare system is a leviathan that is so large and unwieldly that market forces are already coming for it. Their argument is that the same market forces that give us dialysis centers, lasik offices and other such one stop shops for specific health care needs will eventually replace our current expensive institutional system of vast unprofitable hospitals and improve care outcomes while substantially lowering prices.
I think the author's have a fair argument. However, I also don't know if they adequately take into consideration the power of entrenched money and politics to delay these changes as long as possible - and there are lives hanging in the balance of such delay.
Still, it was worth the read. Every viewpoint has value and could inform that final product. That change will inevitably occur is not in doubt. A single sector of the economy cannot continue to use up 17+% of the GDP of the nation and not have deleterious long term effects.
This is the first time I've read a book (written by doctors) that purports that the US healthcare system is a leviathan that is so large and unwieldly that market forces are already coming for it. Their argument is that the same market forces that give us dialysis centers, lasik offices and other such one stop shops for specific health care needs will eventually replace our current expensive institutional system of vast unprofitable hospitals and improve care outcomes while substantially lowering prices.
I think the author's have a fair argument. However, I also don't know if they adequately take into consideration the power of entrenched money and politics to delay these changes as long as possible - and there are lives hanging in the balance of such delay.
Still, it was worth the read. Every viewpoint has value and could inform that final product. That change will inevitably occur is not in doubt. A single sector of the economy cannot continue to use up 17+% of the GDP of the nation and not have deleterious long term effects.
January 6, 2026
Value-based care baby.
February 12, 2026
Muito esclarecedor, atual e otimista!
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews