A health care executive at Harvard explains how to become a savvy consumer and get the value we all deserve for our health care spending.

This book navigates and demystifies the confusing world of health care shopping. Readers go on a guided tour inside American health care to learn why it is so messy, and who is invested in keeping it that way. The text offers a new vision of how health care could work if it were truly designed to meet consumer needs, creating a call to action on how to demand and help create such a system.

A wake-up call to an industry tenuously holding on to the status quo and ripe for true disruption, this book outlines what consumers can do themselves and demand from doctors, hospitals, health plans, and policy makers to get more for their health care spending and, in so doing, reshape the health care system into one we all deserve. Using real and compelling consumer stories intertwined with expert analysis, this book illustrates why it is so difficult to act as an engaged health care consumer in the United States and pulls back the curtain to expose the forces that hold the system in place.

• Covers finding and reading health care price tags, negotiating health care costs, navigating the system, choosing and using health insurance, evaluating quality, and more
• Answers the most common consumer health care question: what should I do?
• Arms consumers with information—and permission—to question, self-advocate, seek, and extract value for their health care dollars
• Offers captivating and relatable real-world consumer stories to make health care concepts clear
• Shows consumers what they can do to make sure they get the care and coverage needed