One look at the chapter titles in the novel The End of Healing by Jim Bailey, MD, makes pretty clear his grim message about the current state of the American healthcare system.

Chapters such as “Institutionalized Gluttony,” “The Plan of Healthcare Hell,” “Medical Violence,” “Procedures for Profit,” “White Coat Hypocrites” or “Counterfeit Care” all foreshadow the next harrowing episode in a young physician’s education.

That excursion into an out-of-control medical industry driven by profits rather than by healing is not unlike Dante’s excursion into hell, Bailey writes in his 489-page novel.

“We have a system that is really perversely organized and often does little to promote health,” said Bailey, a fellow in the American College of Physicians and a professor of medicine at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, where he directs the Center for Health Systems Improvement.

“We’ve organized the system around rescue-sickness care, waiting until things have gone very badly and then pulling out all the stops when things are most expensive. Most disease and premature deaths today are caused by avoidable evils: overeating, inactivity and smoking. We are losing the struggle to overcome the plague of plenty, and the penalty is obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.”

Bailey’s novel was 10 years in the making, a project he began while on sabbatical in Florence, Italy. There, while he studied the Italian healthcare system and the history of medicine, he also began his first venture into fiction writing with a story featuring an idealistic young physician who is horrified when he suddenly comes to realize that despite his Hippocratic vow to do no harm, harm has become his business.

The book likens the doctor’s journey into the healthcare business to Dante’s Inferno, a descension into hell complete with the dire warning to “abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” But the young doctor abandons his cardiology dreams and decides to accept the challenge of an iconoclastic professor to “follow the money” and seeks to understand the dark secrets driving the healthcare industry.

“The Inferno catalogs every type of sin and grades them as he descends into the depths of hell,” said Bailey, who studied the classics, philosophy and math at St. John’s College in Maryland. “All those same types of mistakes occur in the healthcare industry.”

Bailey, through his young protagonist, Dr. Don Newman, takes the reader through a virtual healthcare hazing: procedures for profit, drug reactions, medication errors, hospital infections, lack of health insurance, unnecessary surgery, piles of paperwork and healthcare profiteers, all contributing to hundreds of thousands of lost lives annually.

Bailey notes that in the United States in 2012, some $30 billion was spent on hospitalizations that basic primary care could have prevented. Heart surgeries are often near-miraculous procedures, he adds, but a better approach would be to promote a healthier lifestyle that would make that surgery unnecessary.

The novice author turned to fiction writing in hopes of reaching a larger audience for his message about the need to heal an unhealthy healthcare industry.

“As a researcher and writer of scientific articles, I was not accomplishing what I wanted,” said Bailey, who earned a master of fine arts degree before enrolling in medical school at the University of Alabama. “I could write journal articles until I was blue in the face, but it wasn’t going to have a large influence on building awareness in the general public which I came to realize was essential. The truth is people need a story.”

He notes that nearly one in five Americans has no healthcare insurance and ends up with expensive emergency room treatment at taxpayers’ expense. One of every three dollars spent on healthcare goes to paperwork.

Bailey says an average of 15 medical tests are performed each year on every man, woman and child in the United States. Most of those tests, he adds, are useless.

He says his colleagues in the medical community have been supportive of his work, which, he wants to make clear, is aimed at the healthcare system and not at those who work in it. Most of them, he adds, know the system is broken.

“It’s not about bad doctors or nurses or even pharmaceutical reps or insurance company executives or hospital administrators,” Bailey said of his novel. “All of those people are out there working, trying to improve the piece of the system they’re working in, and they’re working often heroically in this dysfunctional system to try to provide the care people need most. It’s not about people, but a systems-organization problem.”

Bailey wrote the first few chapters of his book in 2004 and five years later thought he had completed his novel and was eager to have it published. His wife, Sharon, who was his critic, editor and supporter, disagreed and told him it needed more work.

“Thank God she hasn’t left me because I’ve tormented her with this book,” Bailey said with a laugh. “This has been a compulsion for me. For awhile I was worried that everything would be fixed before I finished the book. There was no need to worry about that.”