Tomorrow (February 1) sees the publication of Healing the Sick Care System: Why People Matter.
Penned by by Gil Bashe, chair global health and purpose at FINN Partners, the book challenges leaders across health, life sciences, technology and policy ecosystems to rethink how care is designed, delivered and experienced.
Here we share the foreward by Tom Lawry, author of Health Care Nation: The Future is Calling and It’s Better Than You Think.
Lawry’s work has helped frame how leaders understand the U.S. health system at this moment of change.
His perspective highlights why leadership, culture and human-centred design are as important as innovation.
In Health Care Nation, I wrote that we are living through the most consequential transformation in the history of modern medicine—a shift driven not by technology alone, but by a society finally waking up to the reality that our health system has become more “sick-care” than healthcare.
We spend more, achieve less, and tolerate outcomes that would be unacceptable in every other industrialised nation.
And because the system is strained, misaligned, and inequitable, the people inside it—clinicians, caregivers, patients—carry the burden.
That is why this book matters.
Gil Bashe has long been one of the clearest, most principled voices calling out the broken incentives and moral hazards that shape American healthcare.
He has also been a persistent advocate for something our system desperately needs: a renewed social contract—one that treats health not as a commodity, but as a shared human responsibility.
What Gil has done here is more than diagnose what’s wrong. He has written a book about possibility.
He reminds us that healthcare isn’t failing because we lack clinical talent, scientific brilliance, or technological innovation.
Healthcare is failing because the system around all that brilliance has calcified. Complexity has replaced clarity. Competition has replaced collaboration.
Incentives reward activity, not outcomes. Stakeholders talk past one another. And the people we claim to serve increasingly feel unseen, unheard, and left to fend for themselves.
Gil brings a rare combination of moral conviction and industry fluency to these issues.
He writes with the compassion of someone who has seen too many patients harmed by systemic inertia; with the clarity of someone who has worked across every part of the healthcare ecosystem; and with the urgency of someone who knows that incremental reform is no longer enough.
The Moment We Are In
We are now at an inflection point.
Clinical workforce burnout is at record levels. Trust in health institutions is frayed. Chronic disease continues to rise. Communities with the least resources have the worst outcomes.
And the economic strain of healthcare is no longer an isolated policy problem—it is a national security threat, a workforce threat, and a generational threat.
At the same time, we stand on the edge of unprecedented opportunity.
Advances in artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, personalised medicine, and digital care delivery hold the potential to fundamentally rebalance how care is delivered.
In the right hands and applied the right way, these tools can increase the human capacity to care. They can reduce cognitive burden, eliminate waste, and restore clinicians to the work of healing.
But technology alone will not save us. Gil reminds us that tools don’t transform systems—people and leadership do.
A System That Works for People, Not the Other Way Around
Throughout this book, Gil calls for something that should be obvious, but still isn’t: healthcare must be designed around people—patients and professionals—not around payment models, regulatory structures, or institutional self-protection.
He challenges us to confront the uncomfortable truth that our system was never truly designed; it was assembled over decades, patchwork on top of patchwork.
And now, as pressures mount, we see the consequences everywhere: from families who can’t access basic care to nurses who can’t take a lunch break to patients navigating a labyrinth of prior authorisations, portals, apps, and payer rules.
Gil’s work is powerful because it rejects the false choice between moral purpose and operational excellence.
He understands that doing the right thing and doing the smart thing are often the same. A system built around prevention costs less. A system built around trust works better.
A system built around collaboration scales faster. A system built around health—rather than sick care—produces stronger, more resilient communities.
This is where his thinking aligns with the themes I explored in Health Care Nation: the recognition that change is not only possible, but necessary—and that the path forward requires courage, leadership, and a willingness to think boldly about what healthcare should be.
A Call to Action
What I admire most about Gil’s writing is that he treats readers as partners in change. He doesn’t offer passive commentary. He issues a call to action.
He asks leaders to rise above their institutional interests.
He asks policymakers to prioritise health over politics.
He asks clinicians to reclaim their voice and agency.
He asks innovators to pursue progress with responsibility and humility.
He asks all of us—citizens, consumers, communities—to demand better and imagine more.
Healthcare transformation is not theoretical.
It is personal. Every one of us will eventually confront the system Gil describes—whether as a patient, a parent, a caregiver, or a loved one. And each of us has a role in shaping what comes next.
Why This Book Matters Now
This book arrives at precisely the right moment. It challenges the status quo with moral clarity.
It reframes healthcare not as an industry, but as a shared human enterprise. It gives leaders a roadmap and citizens a voice.
And it insists that the future is not something we wait for—it is something we build.
Gil Bashe has written a book full of truth, challenge, and hope.
It forces us to reckon with what healthcare has become—and to imagine what it could be.
If you care about the future of American healthcare, read this book.
And more importantly, act on it.
US readers can order Healing the Sick Care System here.
UK readers can order here.
