About Steve Hyde

Steve Hyde (the one to you right) wants to tell you how to fix our otherwise unsustainable health care system.

is Qualifications

Steve has spent the past half-century wending his way through almost every major sector of the system, including executive, regulatory, policy, speaking, authorial, and consulting roles in:

  • HMOs
  • Health insurance
  • Medical groups
  • Hospitals
  • Actuarial analysis
  • Self-funded employer insurance
  • Disease management
  • Pharmacy benefit management
  • National health reform.

He has worked with and advised scores of health care organizations throughout the country. Yet, despite his efforts—and those of so many others—the health care system, while temporarily showing improvement during the initial years of the HMO/managed-care era (1973-1995), remains a bloody disaster.

 

Steve’s Focus

For most of this new century, Steve has focused on understanding the health care system’s fundamental flaws and on engineering real-world solutions. His study of economics and human behavior have only reinforced his argument that these solutions lie not in top-down, paternalistic government and employer bureaucracies but in American consumers armed with information and control of all the money. This theme has permeated all of his books:

Prescription Drugs for Half-Price or Less (2005)

Cured! The Insider’s Handbook for Health Care Reform (2009)

How Jeff Bezos Can Fix Health Care: Leading the Transparency Revolution (2020)

All offer workable solutions to achieve far lower costs, higher quality, long-term affordability.

Why not a consumer-driven market?

Steve has spent much of this new century figuring out why the consumer markets that have so effectively delivered our other necessities of life have so utterly failed for our medical needs. The key problems were outlined in a 1963 paper by Nobel Laureate, Kenneth Arrow, titled,
Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care.

Mr. Arrow identified two primary culprits:

  1. A lack of adequate consumer information and
  2. The inability to commercial insurers to sell health insurance sustainably to everyone.

Dr. Arrow did not conclude, as many economists have since claimed, that consumer markets in health care are impossible—only that none have arisen and that there are barriers to their doing so. Steve believes that can now be fixed.

The Hyde on Healthcare Website

These pages, besides shamelessly showcasing Steve, his books, and his spellbinding speaking style, allow him to update, explicate, and expand upon how America’s consumers can take control of their insurance and medical purchases away from the paternalistic, top-down corporate and government bureaucracies that continue to do such a horrible job.

The True Healthcare Solution

The ultimate solution will be to allow consumers to control all the money and to make their own purchase decisions based on the answers to two simple questions:

  1. For my medical needs, who are the highest-quality, most appropriate providers?
  2. Of those, which one is cheapest?