Businessman David Goldhill's father died of a hospital-related infection. His book Catastrophic Care argues that the American health care system needs to become more consumer-driven.

Businessman David Goldhill's father died of a hospital-related infection. His book Catastrophic Care argues that the American health care system needs to become more consumer-driven.

In 2007, David Goldhill's father, in good overall health, checked into the hospital with a minor case of pneumonia. Within a few days, he developed sepsis, then a wave of secondary infections. A few weeks after entering the hospital and the day after his 83rd birthday, he died.

Shortly after, Goldhill read an article that changed the course of his life. He learned just how common hospital infection deaths like his father's are: An estimated 100,000 happen in the U.S. each year. Goldhill also learned just how simple it can be to prevent them in some cases as simple as regulating physician hand-washing.

So Goldhill set out to learn as much as he could about our convoluted, insurance-based health care system. And he found that much of it is broken.

His new book is called Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father and How We Can Fix it. Goldhill first wrote about the experience in a 2009 Atlantic cover story.

As president of the Game Show Network, Goldhill approaches the topic from a business perspective. He believes patients should take on more of a consumer role.

"It seemed strange that any industry could have a relatively low-cost way of significantly improving its customer experience," he tells weekends on All Things Considered host Jacki Lyden, "and it would be hard to get the industry to adopt it."

Goldhill says the true cost of our health care is massive and it is hidden.

He looks at a typical entry-level employee earning about $35,000 a year. He finds that over the course of her lifetime she will pay more than $1 million to support her and her family's health care. And that's if there is zero growth in costs and if she avoids major illness.

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Father's Death Spurs Son To Tackle Health Care