Flatlined: How Profit Broke American Healthcare
American healthcare is the most expensive in the world. Yet for millions of Americans, getting sick can mean financial ruin, endless bureaucracy, delayed care, or simply being unable to afford the treatment they need.
How did we get here?
Flatlined: How Profit Broke American Healthcare takes a hard look at the forces that transformed healthcare from a public good into one of America's most powerful profit-driven industries. From insurance companies and pharmaceutical giants to hospitals, private equity, corporate medicine, and the growing business of treating disease, this book examines how financial incentives have increasingly come to shape decisions that should be centered on patients.
But this is not simply a story about greed. It is a story about a system designed over decades, where every participant can be acting rationally within the rules while the system as a whole produces irrational and often devastating results.
Flatlined explores how prices became disconnected from value, why administrative complexity consumes billions of dollars, how consolidation has reshaped medical care, why physicians are increasingly caught between patients and corporate demands, and how ordinary Americans have been left carrying the consequences.
Most importantly, the book asks a question that reaches beyond politics:
What would American healthcare look like if patients, rather than profits, were placed at the center of the system?
Part investigation, part critique, and part call to action, Flatlined challenges the assumption that expensive healthcare must be synonymous with better healthcare. It exposes the incentives that keep the system running, even when it fails the people it was built to serve.
Because healthcare should not be a luxury, a financial transaction, or a corporate strategy.
It should be about keeping people alive, healthy, and whole.
