Download An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books
Download An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books
Download As PDF : An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017
"This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene
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.
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 healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.
Download An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books
"An American Sickness is a gripping, fast paced and revolting dive from 50,000 feet above into the morass of what passes for healthcare in the USA. Patients are barely tolerated in a system optimized to pass money from bank accounts to providers. The industry is mean, nasty and greedy, with worse results than comparable nations - for far more cost. Everything you feared is true, and there is much more in these 400 pages.
Because Rosenthal (an MD herself) was a columnist for the New York Times, she received thousands of contacts over the years. She researched them and they provide the vivid and shameful examples of financial abuse in the industry (with real names). She has distilled them into a perverse list of principles of US healthcare that explains everything and forms the backbone of the book:
1. More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive treatment.
2. A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure.
3. Amenities and marketing matter more than good care.
4. As technologies age, prices go up rather than fall.
5. There is no free choice. Patients are stuck. And they’re stuck buying American.
6. More competition vying for business doesn’t mean better prices. It can drive prices up, not down.
7. Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices. With their market power, big providers can simply demand more.
8. There is no such thing as a fixed price for a procedure or test. And the uninsured pay the highest prices of all.
9. There are no standards for billing. There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything.
10. Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.
As the American economy freefalls into dysfunction, doctors and nurses have become “independent contractorsâ€, just like everyone else. They must look out for themselves first. Administrators are no longer senior caregivers but numbers people who must limit the poorly insured and maximize the profit on every square foot.
What becomes obvious is that the “market†system has failed utterly and completely. Health cannot be left to capitalists, be they doctors, hospitals or manufacturers. The rest of the western world and history are the proof: “If the March of Dimes was operating according to today’s foundation models, we’d have iron lungs in five different colors controlled by iPhone apps – but we wouldn’t have a cheap polio vaccine,†Rosenthal quotes Dr. Michael Brownlee. The incentives are all wrong.
An American Sickness is a public service. It gathers, for the first time I know of, the various scams used by the professions to jack up bills. It explains the why and the how of all those bills being so high. It is well organized, clear and it puts everything into perspective as part of a greater scheme. It identifies what to look out for, what to ask, and how to skirt the event horizon. Rosenthal provides really useful links and sample letters, because customers are all in this same situation – ignorant and powerless. I particularly like her examination of prices for the same procedures around the world. You can afford to have treatments elsewhere, because the costs are so much less, that you can throw in the travel – for two – and still come out well ahead. This book is worth far more than a month’s health insurance; it can save you a fortune, and give you back your life.
David Wineberg"
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An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books Reviews :
An American Sickness How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back Elisabeth Rosenthal 9780143110859 Books Reviews
- An American Sickness is a gripping, fast paced and revolting dive from 50,000 feet above into the morass of what passes for healthcare in the USA. Patients are barely tolerated in a system optimized to pass money from bank accounts to providers. The industry is mean, nasty and greedy, with worse results than comparable nations - for far more cost. Everything you feared is true, and there is much more in these 400 pages.
Because Rosenthal (an MD herself) was a columnist for the New York Times, she received thousands of contacts over the years. She researched them and they provide the vivid and shameful examples of financial abuse in the industry (with real names). She has distilled them into a perverse list of principles of US healthcare that explains everything and forms the backbone of the book
1. More treatment is always better. Default to the most expensive treatment.
2. A lifetime of treatment is preferable to a cure.
3. Amenities and marketing matter more than good care.
4. As technologies age, prices go up rather than fall.
5. There is no free choice. Patients are stuck. And they’re stuck buying American.
6. More competition vying for business doesn’t mean better prices. It can drive prices up, not down.
7. Economies of scale don’t translate to lower prices. With their market power, big providers can simply demand more.
8. There is no such thing as a fixed price for a procedure or test. And the uninsured pay the highest prices of all.
9. There are no standards for billing. There’s money to be made in billing for anything and everything.
10. Prices will rise to whatever the market will bear.
As the American economy freefalls into dysfunction, doctors and nurses have become “independent contractorsâ€, just like everyone else. They must look out for themselves first. Administrators are no longer senior caregivers but numbers people who must limit the poorly insured and maximize the profit on every square foot.
What becomes obvious is that the “market†system has failed utterly and completely. Health cannot be left to capitalists, be they doctors, hospitals or manufacturers. The rest of the western world and history are the proof “If the March of Dimes was operating according to today’s foundation models, we’d have iron lungs in five different colors controlled by iPhone apps – but we wouldn’t have a cheap polio vaccine,†Rosenthal quotes Dr. Michael Brownlee. The incentives are all wrong.
An American Sickness is a public service. It gathers, for the first time I know of, the various scams used by the professions to jack up bills. It explains the why and the how of all those bills being so high. It is well organized, clear and it puts everything into perspective as part of a greater scheme. It identifies what to look out for, what to ask, and how to skirt the event horizon. Rosenthal provides really useful links and sample letters, because customers are all in this same situation – ignorant and powerless. I particularly like her examination of prices for the same procedures around the world. You can afford to have treatments elsewhere, because the costs are so much less, that you can throw in the travel – for two – and still come out well ahead. This book is worth far more than a month’s health insurance; it can save you a fortune, and give you back your life.
David Wineberg - I have been a nurse since 1978 and have had a front row seat to the changes in health care in the ensuing decades. I teach health policy and am amazed at what I didn't know about the way our health care system is financed. It is appalling. You should be scared. You should read this book and work for change.
- Not a subject matter I would normally be interested in, but in the current political climate I felt I should get a better understanding of what is going on in the healthcare industries. The four chapters on the history of the American heath insurance industry, hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical industry alone make the book worthwhile to read.
I am not a big fan of the government getting involved in healthcare, however if we are going to let free enterprise control the costs I think it is important to know if the healthcare industries will respond to true competition like other industries such as the telecommunication and automotive industries. This book says it will not because it is functionally different. For example only 18% of hospitals are for profit. The 62% majority are nonprofit hospitals that get billions of dollars in tax breaks if they use their profits to help the poor. The government runs the other 20%. If nonprofits make too much money they just spend more. As court case after court case indicates they do not always spend those big profits to help the poor. You also learn the average of how much the pharmaceutical companies actually spend on research and development of a new drug. It is not always the billion dollar figure you hear so much about.
I am sure once conservatives learn that the author is a Harvard Medical School trained doctor that now writes for the New York Times they will discount it as biased against business and not accurate. However, the question is not the author's political leanings, but is the information correct? I have checked some, but not all, of what the author has stated and so far it checks out. - A well written and detailed analysis of the origins and possible solutions of the disastrous state of US healthcare. As a practicing physician specializing in diabetes I see the effects of a dehumanized system where every segment is focusing in getting the biggest possible piece of the pie. You may not agree on every point but the analysis is solid and well documented. An analysis of why Americans are so poorly educated and gullible on healthcare issues would have added additional value
- Dr. Rosenthal's background makes her uniquely qualified to write this well-researched book. Frightening, disturbing, but with a ray of hope...it is simply a must-read book for anyone needing healthcare in the U.S. Or, if you have friends or relatives who do, or will.
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