This name Copernicus Healthcare was chosen for our publishing company and website because of the importance of the historic paradigm shift of the Copernican revolution and its parallel with the urgent need for another kind of paradigm shift in U.S. health care. The profit-oriented market-based health care system in America today is totally out of touch with the needs of Americans. It is imploding because of increasingly unaffordable costs that leaves many sick people without needed health care. All efforts so far to reform the system in the public interest have been stifled by powerful corporate stakeholders in the status quo.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1543) was a Renaissance astronomer who conceived a comprehensive heliocentric cosmology that, for the first time, displaced the Earth from the center of the universe, instead putting the sun in that center. What became known as the Copernican Revolution is regarded as a landmark in the history of science and the starting point of modern astronomy. It caused a paradigm shift in thinking about the place of the Earth in the universe. Less known is that Copernicus was a true generalist, with interests and skills ranging from mathematics, medicine, law, economics, philosophy and the classics.

This kind of paradigm shift is now needed in U.S. health care:

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We need to turn around our thinking about health care by 180 degrees:

• Moving stakeholders in the medical-industrial complex from the center of our “system”, and replacing them with patients and their families.

• Exploring how today's fragmented and depersonalized health care can be shifted towards more personal caring and healing relationships between caregivers and patients.

• Moving from profits driven by a business “ethic” to a not-for-profit system based on service.

• Shifting from a system based on ability to pay to one based on medical need.

• Moving from health care as a commodity for sale on a free market to a basic human need and right.

• Moving from a dysfunctional, fragmented and exploitive private health insurance industry to a single publicly-financed risk pool.

• Moving from political and lobbyist-driven coverage policies toward those based on scientific evidence of cost-effectiveness.

• Replacing today’s unaccountable system with one that stewards limited health care resources for the benefit of all Americans (“Everybody in, nobody out”).


The goals of this website are to:

(1) close the gap between what is possible in modern health care and what is actually available to our fellow citizens;

(2) provide a progressive publishing venue for authors to publish scholarly work that advances the debate over approaches to reform the health care system, and...

(3) help to build momentum toward a social movement to adopt needed reforms