Xerox PARC Labs and the Failure of Health Care (Part 1)

The late Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, provided us with enduring lessons in leadership and connection.

Jobs joined Atari, the video gaming pioneer, in the mid-1970s as a young technician. Public accounts from Atari leaders describe him as prickly, abrasive, and unpolished. Atari eventually moved him to the night shift rather than have him work closely with others, solving a people problem while retaining his talent.

Atari executives framed the move partly as practical: Jobs’ friend Steve Wozniak worked at Hewlett-Packard during the day, so putting Jobs on nights meant wonderkid Wozniak could come by after hours and help.

That night-shift arrangement became part of the Apple origin story. The Jobs Wozniak collaboration deepened, and Apple was born. But it wasn’t extraordinary until something else happened.

In 1979, Jobs was invited to visit Xerox PARC laboratories, the research arm of dominant copier company Xerox, which had invested in Apple’s public offering.

Inside that lab were the building blocks of modern personal computing: the graphical user interface (icons and windows), the mouse, laser printing, and more. All ideas that would reshape how people interacted with technology.

Xerox had the invention but lacked the imagination, connectedness, and leadership to see what Jobs saw. John Maxwell tells us that leaders see before others and see more than others. That was certainly true for Xerox.

Which brings us to health care.

In many ways, U.S. health care is extraordinary. Our health professionals and businesses can replace joints, transplant organs, treat cancers, perform important diagnostic and preventive procedures, and build world-class research centers.

The cash cows ─ orthopedics, gastroenterology, dermatology, imaging, specialty drugs, and other high-end procedural medicine ─ are important services; they save and improve lives. But the story of Xerox PARC feels uncomfortably familiar when we look at legacy American health care.

The United States has built the most expensive health care system in the world. In 1970, national health spending was about $74 billion. By 2025, it had reached $5.6 trillion, consuming about 18.5% of the entire U.S. economy.

And yet, for all that spending, we are not getting the outcomes we should expect from those who pay for it, consumers and business. The Commonwealth Fund in 2024 placed the U.S. last in outcomes among ten high-income countries studied.

Health care is one of the most underestimated costs in retirement. On average, retirees report devoting 16% of their total monthly income to it. That line item justifies that we plan for it.

Beyond Medicare plan choice, few of us plan for health, and if we do, we plan only the funding, not our health. Yet we list staying healthy in our goal setting.

In Part 2, PARC Labs and the Failure of Health Care, we’ll get specific about planning for health. It’s important that you do too. We have a road map.