Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget -- nearly 175 billion -- is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about healthcare: we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health.

In Predictive Health, distinguished doctors Kenneth...