David Goldhill

Author of Catastrophic Care, the health-care critique Kyle read in 2019. Goldhill’s central argument is that the U.S. system misuses insurance as the payment mechanism for routine, predictable care rather than confining it to true catastrophic risk — and that the resulting administered, cost-plus Pricing (instead of flexible market prices) drives inflation, underinvestment, and misallocation. His framing of “Surrogates” (insurers, Medicare) severing the consumer’s disciplining role is the book’s organizing metaphor: by removing the consumer from the loop, the system loses the Competition and feedback that on the “Mainland” of normal markets forces lower prices and better service.

The book also frames Goldhill’s own intellectual trajectory — the closing John Maynard Keynes epigraph (“When the facts change, I change my mind”) is presented as marking his evolution from a conventional Democrat to a market-skeptic-of-the-system position. His backward-Incentives thesis (more revenue for excess treatment, penalties for efficiency) Kyle connects to The Man Who Broke Capitalism and Financialization.

Context: David Goldhill is a media executive (former CEO of the Game Show Network) who wrote the 2009 Atlantic essay “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” which he later expanded into the 2013 book Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father — and How We Can Fix It.

Where this appears

• Catastrophic Care — author of the book; his Surrogate / consumer-discipline thesis structures the entire argument Kyle highlighted.

Current role

Board Chair at The Leapfrog Group — profile.