Critics everywhere have hailed this book as a classic in the making.

    Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families—unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans.The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating. In Boston, a heart attack victim becomes a casualty of emergency room overcrowding when she is turned away from the one hospital that could treat her. In South Central L.A., a security guard loses part of his vision when he can't find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the middle of the prairie heartland, a retired meatpacker sells his house to pay for the medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. And, in a tiny village tucked into the Catskill mountains, a mother of three young children decides against a costly doctor's visit—and lets a deadly cancer go undetected—because her husband's high-tech job no longer provides health insurance.Passionate, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick interweaves these stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington and takes us inside the medical industry to chronicle the decline of America's health care system—and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.

    Otis Brawley is the chief medical and scientific officer of The American Cancer Society, an oncologist with a dazzling clinical, research, and policy career. How We Do Harm pulls back the curtain on how medicine is really practiced in America. Brawley tells of doctors who select treatment based on payment they will receive, rather than on demonstrated scientific results; hospitals and pharmaceutical companies that seek out patients to treat even if they are not actually ill (but as long as their insurance will pay); a public primed to swallow the latest pill, no matter the cost; and rising healthcare costs for unnecessary—and often unproven—treatments that we all pay for. Brawley calls for rational healthcare, healthcare drawn from results-based, scientifically justifiable treatments, and not just the peddling of hot new drugs.Brawley's personal history – from a childhood in the gang-ridden streets of black Detroit, to the green hallways of Grady Memorial Hospital, the largest public hospital in the U.S., to the boardrooms of The American Cancer Society—results in a passionate view of medicine and the politics of illness in America - and a deep understanding of healthcare today. How We Do Harm is his well-reasoned manifesto for change.

    Drawing on exclusive accounts from whistleblowers and regulators, as well as thousands of pages of confidential FDA documents, Eban reveals an industry where fraud is rampant, companies routinely falsify data, and executives circumvent almost every principle of safe manufacturing to minimize cost and maximize profit, confident in their ability to fool inspectors. Meanwhile, patients unwittingly consume medicine with unpredictable and dangerous effects.The story of generic drugs is truly global. It connects middle America to China, India, sub-Saharan Africa and Brazil, and represents the ultimate litmus test of globalization: what are the risks of moving drug manufacturing offshore, and are they worth the savings? A decade-long investigation with international sweep, high-stakes brinkmanship and big money at its core, Bottle of Lies reveals how the world’s greatest public-health innovation has become one of its most astonishing swindles.

    This updated edition of the Health Care Handbook covers:• New sections on health IT, team-based care and health care quality• A clear summary of health policy and the Affordable Care Act• Inpatient & outpatient health care and delivery systems• Health insurance and the factors that make health care so expensive• Concise summaries of 32 different health professions• Medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and the research world• And much, much moreThe Handbook is the one-stop guide to the people, organizations and industries that make up the U.S. health care system and major issues the system faces today. It is rigorously researched and scrupulously unbiased yet written in a conversational and humorous tone that's a pleasure to read and illuminates the convoluted health care system and its many components. The Handbook is now used by hundreds of academic programs and health care companies.Each section of the book includes an introduction to the key facts and foundations that make the health care system work along with balanced analyses of the major challenges and controversies within health care, including medical errors, government regulation, medical malpractice, and much more. Suggested readings are included for readers who wish to learn more about specific topics.

    Some of these drugs are truly transformative, offering major improvements in how long patients live or how they feel--but what is often missing from the popular narrative is that, far too often, these new drugs have marginal or minimal benefits. Some are even harmful. In Malignant, hematologist-oncologist Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad writes about the many sobering examples of how patients are too often failed by cancer policy and by how oncology is practiced. Throughout this work, Prasad illuminates deceptive practices which- promote novel cancer therapies long before credible data are available to support such treatment; and- exaggerate the potential benefits of new therapies, many of which cost thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars.Prasad then critiques the financial conflicts of interest that pervade the oncology field, the pharmaceutical industry, and the US Food and Drug administration.This is a book about how the actions of human beings--our policies, our standards of evidence, and our drug regulation--incentivize the pursuit of marginal or unproven therapies at lofty and unsustainable prices. Prasad takes us through how cancer trials are conducted, how drugs come to market, and how pricing decisions are made, asking how we can ensure that more cancer drugs deliver both greater benefit and a lower price. Ultimately, Prasad says,- more cancer clinical trials should measure outcomes that actually matter to people with cancer;- patients on those trials should look more like actual global citizens;- we need drug regulators to raise, not perpetually lower, the bar for approval; and- we need unbiased patient advocates and experts.This well-written, opinionated, and engaging book explains what we can do differently to make serious and sustained progress against cancer--and how we can avoid repeating the policy and practice mistakes of the past.

    social legislation. The new law extends health insurance to nearly all Americans, fulfilling a century-long quest and bringing the United States to parity with other industrial nations. Affordable Care aims to control rapidly rising health care costs and promises to make the United States more equal, reversing four decades of rising disparities between the very rich and everyone else. Millions of people of modest means will gain new benefits and protections from insurance company abuses - and the tab will be paid by privileged corporations and the very rich.How did such a bold reform effort pass in a polity wracked by partisan divisions and intense lobbying by special interests? What does Affordable Care mean - and what comes next? In Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol--two of the nation's leading experts on politics and health care policy--provide a concise and accessible overview. They explain the political battles of 2009 and 2010, highlighting White House strategies, the deals Democrats cut with interest groups, and the impact of agitation by Tea Partiers and progressives. Jacobs and Skocpol spell out what the new law can do for everyday Americans, what it will cost, and who will pay. Above all, they explain what comes next, as critical yet often behind-the-scenes battles rage over implementing reform nationally and in the fifty states. Affordable Care might end up being weakened. But, like Social Security and Medicare, it could also gain strength and popularity as the majority of Americans learn what it can do for them.

    We like to imagine that it’s based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature surrounding a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve hopeless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients.All these problems have been protected from public scrutiny because they’re too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Dr. Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us. In his own words, “the tricks and distortions documented in these pages are beautiful, intricate, and fascinating in their details.” With Goldacre’s characteristic flair and a forensic attention to detail, Bad Pharma reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done. This is the pharmaceutical industry as it has never been seen before.

    

    Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's U.S. health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.The problem, Reinhardt says, is not one of economics but of social ethics. There is no American political consensus on a fundamental question other countries settled long ago: to what extent should we be our brothers' and sisters' keepers when it comes to health care? Drawing on the best evidence, he guides readers through the chaotic, secretive, and inefficient way America finances health care, and he offers a penetrating ethical analysis of recent reform proposals. At this point, he argues, the United States appears to have three stark choices: the government can make the rich help pay for the health care of the poor, ration care by income, or control costs. Reinhardt proposes an alternative path: that by age 26 all Americans must choose either to join an insurance arrangement with community-rated premiums, or take a chance on being uninsured or relying on a health insurance market that charges premiums based on health status.An incisive look at the American health care system, Priced Out dispels the confusion, ignorance, myths, and misinformation that hinder effective reform.

    Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an urban problem had arrived in the town to stay. Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. Dr. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: as a doctor unique in his abilities; as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency."

    

    Using a unique systems approach, it brings together an extraordinary breadth of information into a highly accessible, easy-to-read text that clarifies the complexities of health care organization and finance, while presenting a solid overview of how the various components fit together.

    In this indispensable book, the staff of the Washington Post tells the story of health-care reform and explains what it means for the American people.In the book’s first section, the Washington Post’s reporter embedded in the White House provides a behind-the-scenes narrative of how Obama and the Democrats pushed through health-care reform in the face of nearly unanimous Republican opposition. This section traces the tortured evolution of the legislation, showing how the Senate killed the public option, how the January 2010 victory of Republican senator Scott Brown left the Democrats scrambling, and how Democratic leaders ultimately negotiated among entrenched political factions—including disillusioned Democrats—to reach a compromise.What does this final package include? The book’s second section provides an accessible summary of the legislation that Obama signed into law in March 2010. In the third section, Washington Post writers answer the most pressing questions about the health-care legislation’s immediate impact. Most importantly, how will the new bill affect individuals—small-business owners, uninsured Americans with pre-existing conditions, and twenty-somethings on their parents’ policies? This is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how this legislation came into being and what the new health-care program means.

    But starting in the late 1990s, shocking reports emerged that showed this was far from the truth. Treatment-related deaths or “complications” were found to be the fifth leading cause of death for Americans, and hundreds of thousands of patients were being harmed by botched medical procedures.Spurred by the quality crisis, a group of visionary physicians led by Donald Berwick and Paul Batalden embarked on a study of industrial “quality improvement” techniques, daring to apply them to the practice of medicine despite resistance from the medical community. The Best Practice tells the story of this burgeoning movement, and of how the medical landscape is being radically transformed—for the better.