"Dr. Guy Clifton lays out the problems in our health care system with extraordinary clarity and compassion, and he offers workable solutions. This book should be required reading for anybody who thinks health care needs fixing."
-Shannon Brownlee, Schwartz Senior Fellow, New America Foundation, and author of Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer

"Dr. Clifton tells a disturbing, too-often accurate story about our fragmented health care system and the realities American face as they struggle to work with a 1950s approach to providing medical services while living in a twenty-first century world. This disconnect creates serious problems for patients and providers alike. Flatlined offers smart solutions for the future of health care."
-Wade Rose, vice president, External and Government Relations, Catholic Healthcare West

"Guy Clifton [is] a distinguished Texan neurosurgeon who spent a year as a Health Policy Fellow in the US Congress to develop the ideas he presents in this enlightening book, which I think is by far the best of its kind in recent memory. Clifton tells us that physicians need to have a financial incentive for practising efficient medicine. The new administration would do well to read this book, if it is, indeed, committed to intelligent health-care reform."-Noah Raizmann, The Lancet

"Guy Clifton is able to draw readers into his treatise on the health care conundrum. Clifton's solutions offer insight into the complexity of a system in urgent need of change. Clear, concise, well organized, and well researched, the book could be a quick read, but the statistics are so compelling and the issues are so complex that readers will be hard-pressed not to pause."-Journal of the American Medical Association

"This well-researched volume offers well-argued suggestions, and is intentionally accessible to the general public who, the author believes, much be enlisted in the campaign for change. Clifton’s model is an interesting middle road between a nationalized and a privatized system. Recommended."-Choice, August 2009

Flatlined lifts the veil of secrecy on twenty-first century health care and delves into the realities of good people caught in a bad medical system. Dr. Guy L. Clifton, a practitioner as well as a policy advocate, reveals first-hand accounts of needless tragedy, such as the young man who died after a car wreck for lack of a bed in a qualified hospital and the surgeon who was dejected by the scarcity of resources needed to enable him to perform heart surgery on an uninsured man.

Arguing that a lack of coordinated care and quality medical practice benchmarks result in high levels of redundancy and ineffectiveness, Clifton proposes that the key to reducing health care costs, improving quality, and financially protecting the uninsured, is to reduce wastefulness, and offers a solution for achieving success.

Flatlined sounds the warning call: By 2018 Medicare and Medicaid will consume about one-third of the federal budget. American businesses now pay three times as much of their payroll for health care as global competitors, expected to worsen as health care grows at twice the rate of the U.S. economy. Based on his years of experience in policy and medicine, Clifton offers an attainable solution through the development of an American Medical Quality System.

Guy L. Clifton, M.D. is a neurosurgeon, clinical investigator, administrator, and health policy advocate. He is the Runnells Distinguished Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston and has been frequently included in Best Doctors of America. A 2006–2007 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow, he is now devoting himself full-time to health policy reform.