Two Books with a Non-Political Approach to Saving our Failing American Healthcare

An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system – and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems.
“Patients can save thousands of dollars by purchasing An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.”— New York Journal of Books
In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast?
Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw.
The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn’t just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a health care system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Catastrophic Care by David Goldhill
Catastrophic Care explodes the myth that Medicare and insurance coverage can make care cheaper and improve our health. It shows how efforts to reform the system, including the Affordable Care Act, will do nothing to address the waste of the health care industry, which currently costs the country nearly $2.7 trillion annually and in which as many as 200, 000 Americans die each year from preventable erros. Catastrophic Care proposes a completely new approach, one that will change the way you think about one of our most pressing national problems.
The London Guardian’s Michael Wolff says: Powerful—edge0of-the-seat riveting—because it is not, in any sense a policy book. Rather, this is a story about saving ourselves…It steps outside the established political debate and lexicon. It is one of the rare books addressing a major national policy issue that is able to do so in language not already debased by the problem itself. Alas, healthcare civilians can’t actually read most books about healthcare……But you can read this one.
Harvard Medical School Dean of Faculty, Jeffrey S. Flier says: For those who are troubled by both the failures of our health care system and the misdirected diagnosis and prescriptions offered by pundits, policy experts, and politicians from across the political spectrum, Goldhill offers a much needed antidote. By pointing out the almost invisible incentives and regulations that drive the dysfunction of our current system, he offers an illuminating framework for understanding the crisis, and then a path to the kind of reforms that will surely be necessary.