A WORLD UNDIVIDED

Saba, a physician, recounts a career attempting to reform and globalize the health care industry.

The author grew in Beirut, Lebanon, at a time when the country was ravaged by war, an experience from which he learned the essential fragility of all systems, however well-intentioned their design. Later, as a doctor on the front lines of the battle against the AIDS pandemic, that lesson would prove profoundly useful—Saba was always looking for new ways to deliver better health care to vulnerable populations, a challenging enterprise given the resistance of the health care industry at large to organizational progress, a predicament astutely and lucidly described. While a physician in France, he began conducting trials to improve AIDS treatment for the National Agency for AIDS Research and subsequently garnered widespread acclaim for establishing an antiretroviral drug access program—the UNAIDS Drug Access Initiative—to deliver affordable care to poorer nations. Ultimately, Saba would go on to co-found and operate his own company, Axios International, a firm devoted to devising innovative ways to improve access to health care, especially among disadvantaged populations. Still, in Saba’s view, the health care industry remains stubbornly wedded to an outdated model too reliant upon the hospital as a dispenser of care—the author argues that better health care now presupposes the strategic exploitation of new technologies that make global collaboration possible. “Ultimately, globalized healthcare is better healthcare. Imagine a world where you’d have access to not just the doctors in your backyard, but the best doctors in the world right at your fingertips, or highly specialized doctors who may not exist in your city through telemedicine.” The author focuses on his work battling AIDS, but his discussion is impressively wide-ranging and includes an expert reflection on the errors made by the global health care industry in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This is an exceedingly thoughtful rumination from an industry insider who is deeply aware of all the imperfections of his profession while remaining admirably unwilling to accept that real change cannot be affected.

A provocative critique of the health care industry’s failings and a hopeful look at its future.