The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance

Book excerpt: The Healthcare Labyrinth is not just a comprehensive guide to navigating health plans--it offers a blueprint for fixing our broken healthcare system. The American health insurance system is anything but simple to maneuver. Health plan enrollees become entangled in an intricate and opaque maze of confusion, often resulting in frustration, regret, and deep debt. In The Healthcare Labyrinth, health plan and healthcare technology veteran Marc S. Ryan seeks to demystify the U.S. healthcare system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more confidence and certainty. Marc walks through how the current system operates, tracing the dysfunction, high costs, and lack of quality to three major issues: --a lack of affordable universal access; --little focus on wellness, prevention, and care management; and --outrageous pricing, especially compared to other developed nations. Using his decades of experience, Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America's unique system without upending the employer-based system. He relies on leading academic, research, and mainstream media sources from across the political spectrum to examine the U.S. healthcare system and compare it to those of other developed nations.