Over Our Heads: An Analogy on Healthcare, Good Intentions and Unforeseen Consequences

Stacey RF, ISBN: 978-0-9828503-1-2, Cost: $18.95; Gulf Breeze, FL: Fire Starter Publishing; 2011.

The author, Dr Rulon Stacey, is the president of Poudre Valley Health System, which received the Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 2008. In his foreword, Dr Stacey states that his reasons for writing the book were to outline "the primary reasons why the American health care system has reached the point it has today: expensive, complicated, and too often inaccessible."^(pX)

Using the analogy of a fictional grocery store in the fictional city of Capital Springs, Dr Stacey presents his perspective regarding the health care system of today and where our national health care policy went wrong. The 3 foci of this book communicated by Dr Stacey are as follows: (1) Government intervention, fueled by "good intentions," caused this crisis; (2) a significant portion of current health care policy is based on factual inaccuracies; and (3) if left unchecked, health care reform will cause costs to continue to escalate, and the whole system will surely collapse on itself. Throughout the book, gray boxes provide background information linking the information presented in the chapter to relevant health care legislation and programs. Dr Stacey refrains from offering a simple solution to a complex problem. Rather, he provides information the reader can use when appraising proposed solutions to health care reform.

Over Our Heads is 140 pages in length and organized into 8 chapters, with an epilogue. This book is one of the series of books published by the Studor Consulting Group's Firestarter Publishing. The easy-to-read and engaging style of this book distills a very complex topic into understandable elements. Over Our Heads is recommended for anyone interested in learning more about health policy and antecedents to our present health care problems.