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Dr. Alejandro Badia of Miami is no stranger to the flaws and frustrations of the U.S. healthcare system.
A leading hand surgeon with a medical degree from NYU, multiple accolades, and decades of experience, Dr. Badia has spent more than a quarter-century in the trenches of U.S. healthcare. His new book Healthcare from the Trenches is an open discussion of the failure of the U.S. healthcare system from the perspectives of its “providers” and patients — perspectives today’s healthcare debate sorely lacks.
Dr. Badia challenges the entrenched bureaucracy in the U.S. healthcare system, offering solutions from those who understand healthcare best.
• Involve healthcare providers in the healthcare conversation — not just politicians, lobbyists, and insurance administrators who have no medical training or experience in patient care.
• Get rid of the middle-man — administrators and insurance companies — in the healthcare system to create a more efficient and less bloated system. Additional administrators only add to the cost of healthcare while doing nothing to contribute to actual care.
• Require hospitals and health insurance companies to become non-profit. Eliminate multi-million dollar salaries to executives for ‘withholding’ care to keep costs down and their paychecks up.
• Encourage more all-in-one facilities so patients do not need to wait weeks for results they should be able to see in a few hours. Not only does this streamline care, but it significantly reduces costs as well.
• Require increased transparency in healthcare pricing.
• Teach doctors to collaborate rather than compete. They must stand together in the healthcare debate, offering solutions rather than capitulating to lobbyists and insurance companies.
• Educate the public on the issues doctors and patients face from today’s inefficient healthcare system. Change can only come from a public that demands it.
“Despite the political debates and media coverage on healthcare policy and reform, there remains little or no feedback from the people in the trenches — the physicians and other healthcare professionals who provide care to the patients,” Dr. Badia said. “That’s why I wrote Healthcare from the Trenches. My hope is that a broader discussion of the issues can be a catalyst to positive change.”
Dr. Badia is the founder and chief medical officer of the Florida-based OrthoNOW, a pioneering network of single-specialty, immediate orthopedic care centers in South Florida.
“The goal is to provide the patient with the care they need, at the time they need it, minimizing any interference to that process,” Dr. Badia said. “This is a life and death matter and people are dying because of a flawed system. It’s time for every American to be educated about the root causes of our healthcare crisis and demand meaningful reform.”
Healthcare in the Trenches: An Insider Account of the Complex Barriers of U.S. Healthcare from the Providers and Patients’ Perspective, ISBN 978-0-57868-099-6 (Paperback) $19.97, AISN B088PSH2RL (eBook) $2.99, 2020, Badia Hand to Shoulder, 465 pages, available at Amazon or www.DrBadiaBook.com.
Alejandro Badia, MD, FACS, has been in the trenches with our broken healthcare system since 1989.
A hand and upper extremity orthopedic surgeon at Badia Hand to Shoulder Center in Miami, Dr. Badia previously served as chief of hand surgery at Baptist Hospital of Miami. He studied physiology at Cornell University and obtained his medical degree at New York University, where he also trained in orthopedics. A hand fellowship at Alleghany General Hospital in Pittsburgh was followed by an AO Trauma fellowship in Freiburg, Germany.
He runs an active international hand fellowship and previously organized a yearly Miami meeting for surgeons and therapists that was devoted to upper limb arthroscopy and arthroplasty. In 2005, Dr. Badia co-founded the Miami Anatomical Research Center (MARC), one of the world’s largest surgical cadaveric training labs.
In 2008, he completed the Badia Hand to Shoulder Center, a fully integrated clinical facility for the upper limb also encompassing the Surgery Center at Doral, rehabilitation and an MRI imaging facility.
More recently, Dr. Badia inaugurated OrthoNOW, the first intermediate orthopedic urgent care center in South Florida. OrthoNOW was officially franchised in early 2013 and is actively engaging healthcare entrepreneurs and surgeons, in North America and abroad, to open immediate orthopedic care facilities.
For more information on Dr. Badia, visit DrBadia.com, Orthonowcare.com, and DoralDOC.com.
