Bredesen’s Book On Health Care Reform To Be Published

Governor Phil Bredesen has written a book on the future of health care reform and plans a nationwide book tour, NPR interviews, and all.

Bredesen announced the new book today after Grove Press released its fall catalog, in which the publisher promoted Fresh Medicine.. It’s due out in October.

“Basically this is something I went out and sold to the publishers last summer. Did most of the work then. We agreed to hold everything off until we saw what happened with health care reform.”

It came out to 288 pages, hardcover, $23 U.S. The publisher’s blurb is here.

“I mean, this is not Sarah Palin’s book, or anything. We’re talking very, very low-level, very low-level stuff… But I just wanted to, you know….”

“What had really happened, I had so many people over the years, and really, obviously, intensified over health care reform, you know, say, you know, you’ve been around this field for a long time, ‘What do you think we should do?’ And it’s a hard question to answer in a sound bite.”

Bredesen says he wants to see health reform go further.

“We’ve had reform. It doesn’t go far enough in a bunch of areas, …particularly in the area of cost containment. and those things. So I just tried to step back, and set down what I think, where I think we should go from here, and the things we needed to get done. Put it in book form, It’s not ghost-written, I’ve done it all myself. As I say, I did most of it the end of last summer. And then over the Christmas vacation. Obviously since reform has come along, you’ve updated it to reflect the realities of what actually happened… Grove Atlantic is the publisher, and it’ll be out in October.”

An excerpt from the book (from the catalog):
Health care in America….has lost its bearings.
Its productivity has stagnated, with the growth in costs far outstripping the gains in effectiveness. Its blueprint is obsolete: a design for acute illness when it is chronic illness that increasingly absorbs our resources and shortens our lives. Its inertia and entrenched interests paralyze it just when it most needs to change and adjust. Its finances are unsustainable.