Escape Fire: A Powerful Documentary About How We Can Save Our Badly Broken Healthcare System

The Dr. Dean Ornish Program for Reversing Heart Disease is featured prominently in the story that tackles one of the most pressing issues of our time: how can we save our badly broken healthcare system?

Almost 75% of healthcare costs are spent on preventable diseases.

American healthcare costs are rising so rapidly that they could reach $4.2 trillion annually, roughly 20% of our gross domestic product, within ten years. We spend $300 billion a year on pharmaceutical drugs––almost as much as the rest of the world combined. We pay more, yet our health outcomes are worse. About 65% of Americans are overweight and almost 75% of healthcare costs are spent on preventable diseases that are the major causes of disability and death in our society.

It’s not surprising that healthcare tops many Americans’ concerns and is at the center of a political firestorm in our nation’s Capitol. But the current battle over cost and access does not ultimately address the root of the problem: we have a disease-care system, not a healthcare system.

Escape Fire examines the powerful forces maintaining the status quo, a medical industry designed for quick fixes rather than prevention, for profit-driven care rather than patient-driven care. After decades of resistance, a movement to bring innovative high-touch, low-cost methods of prevention and healing into our high-tech, costly system is finally gaining ground.

Award-winning filmmakers Matthew Heineman and Susan Froemke follow dramatic human stories as well as leaders fighting to transform healthcare at the highest levels of medicine, industry, government, and even the US military.

It also offers a powerful testimonial from Mel Lefer, a man who doctor believed could not be saved. After finding Dr. Ornish’s program and following it, he says: My doctor told [Dean] that that he wouldn’t recommend taking me because he didn’t think that I would live the year. So he figured I was going to die because I was in such bad shape. And now 25 years later, I’m in pretty good shape.”

Watch the clip here.