For Policy Organizations, Researchers & Journalists
A Research Base for Healthcare Reform Work
Broken Promises is a sourced, ongoing investigation into American healthcare — how it's priced, how it's financed, how public health institutions have fared under pressure, and what the evidence says about replacing rather than patching the system. If your work involves any of that, this page explains what's here, how it's sourced, and how to use it.
Who This Page Is For
If you work on healthcare reform, this is built for you
This site is not a marketing page for a book. It's a body of investigative research — three books tracing American healthcare's financing architecture from a single pharmacy receipt to a proposed replacement system, plus two books examining how public trust in the CDC, NIH, and HHS held up under pressure, plus a state-level single-payer policy proposal with a drafted bill. If you're a policy researcher, journalist, advocacy organization, educator, or student working on any part of that terrain, the material here is meant to be read, cited, shared, and built on.
What's Here
Browse the research by subject
Each of these is a standing investigation, not a summary — start wherever your work intersects.
Prescription Drugs
Why Medicine Costs What It Does
The hidden supply chain behind a prescription's price — manufacturers, middlemen, and the law that keeps Medicare from negotiating.
Read the investigation →Insurance & Financing
How Financing Overtook Care
Denials, consolidation, private equity, and the financial machinery that came to matter more than the medicine it was built to support.
Read the investigation →Single-Payer
What Would Replace It
What single-payer actually is, how it would be financed, the evidence for and against it, and the state-level bill already drafted.
See the policy case →Science & Public Health
Institutions Under Pressure
How public trust in the CDC collapsed during COVID-19, and how the NIH, CDC, and HHS were reshaped in 2025 — two investigations, one crisis.
Read both investigations →Reform & Design
What Should Replace It
Seven design principles any good financing system must honor, drawn from studying six other nations — not to copy them, but to learn what their designs prove.
Read the investigation →The Full Investigation
The Complete Trilogy
From a single pharmacy receipt to the architecture of the entire system — the three-book investigation that started it all.
Start the trilogy →Every Source, Verified
Annotated Bibliography
30 sources — GAO audits, JAMA studies, CDC reports — independently verified against the primary source, not just link-checked, and organized by topic.
Browse the sources →Sourcing & Credibility
Where the evidence comes from
Robert Coleman spent forty years inside American healthcare, sixteen of them as Director of Clinical Pharmacy Services at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, with a peer-reviewed publication history spanning infectious disease, pharmacokinetics, anticoagulation therapy, and medical informatics — available via Google Scholar. The books on this site are written from that vantage point: as an investigator and former practitioner, not an advocate or a policy-organization staffer.
How We Source Claims
Every factual claim on this site and in these books is sourced — to government data, peer-reviewed research, court records, or other primary sources. Where a figure is a model or projection rather than an observed count, we say so, and report the range rather than a single headline number. If you believe a citation has been misrepresented, tell us — we want to know.
One limitation worth stating plainly: the subject pages on this site are built entirely from material already published in these books, not from a running feed of external research. That makes them narrower than a full policy-organization reference library, but every claim on them traces back to a specific, sourced investigation rather than an unattributed aggregation.
Using This Resource
Linking, citing, and sharing
You're welcome to link to any page on this site, cite the books in your own research or reporting, and share the research library with colleagues, students, or coalition partners. If you're citing a specific figure or claim, please cite the originating book rather than the site generally, since that's where the sourcing and full context live.
What you can share
- The complete research library, or a specific research page matched to your audience
- The annotated bibliography — useful on its own as a sourcing reference
- Individual investigations: prescription drug pricing, insurance & financing, single-payer, science & public health, reform & design
- The American Healthcare Investigation trilogy
Suggested link text: "Broken Promises – A Healthcare Reform: Research and educational resources on the American healthcare system."
If you're considering the material for a syllabus, a coalition resource list, a story, or testimony, and want to talk through which sections are most relevant to your specific work, reach out directly — see below.
Questions about the research, a potential collaboration, or a correction to something already published — all of it goes to the same place.