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Healthcare Dino heading toward a tar pit! |
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Sick, by Jonathan Cohn
www.amazon.com/Sick-Untold-Americas-Health-Crisis
Summary: America's health care system is unraveling. 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.
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Toward a Healthy Society by Milton Fisk
Skillfully blending philosophy, economics, and public policy, Fisk's book breaks new ground in political morality and raises important questions about the way people's needs for health care are being defined to satisfy corporate priorities. At a time when so many Americans can barely afford to get sick, no one concerned with this issue can afford to ignore this work of realism and vision.
"The best book on health care reform in the last decade--philosophically deep, politically astute, and legally fascinating. Fisk makes his case for reform cogently and in a manner that is fair-minded, reasonable, and eminently respectful of the different voices that speak within a multicultural democracy. This superb original analysis of U.S. 'corporate' medicine will be very useful."--Rosemarie Tong, author of Controlling Our Reproductive Destiny and Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.
Buy this book at: Barns and Noble
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| The Truth About the Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, MD ( former editor of the New Endland Journal of Medicine), Random House, 2004.....very revealing analysis of big pharmaceuticals, their research efforts, marketing practices, politics.....a strong indictment of the industry.
Buy this book at: Barns and Noble
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Falling Though the Safety Net by Dr. John Geyman
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this stunning mixture of real life stories and cold-eyed analysis, Geyman brings you close up to the perils faced by every American. With nearly all Americans facing a lack of health insurance at some point, this is a book for you.
To those who would take the Alfred E. Newman stance toward health insurance (What me worry, I'm healthy!), Geyman delivers some sobering statistics:
Eighty percent of the uninsured live in working families;
Sixty-seven million Americans are uninsured for at least one month in a twenty-eight month period;
One in five workers cannot afford insurance when offered by employers;
Even in families with two full-time wage earners, ten percent are uninsured.
Those who lack insurance face poor health care and increased risk of bad outcomes. The answer, argues Dr. Geyman, is one the majority of Americans already want: single payer health insurance.
This is the book for those who no longer want this problem to be as American as apple pie.
John Geyman, M.D., is professor emeritus of Family -Medicine at the University of Washington, and editor of the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice.
Buy this book from Common Courage: Press http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=254 for $12.32.
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Healthcare Meltdown by Dr. Bob LeBow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, and the elite of the medical profession are doing their best to keep Americans clueless. They have created a whole mythology to keep us misinformed, to maintain their profitability, and to keep health care reform at bay.
Buy this book at: Powells Books
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Critical Condition by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
FROM THE PUBLISHER
More than 100 million people with inadequate or no medical coverage...Dirty examination and operating rooms in doctors' offices and hospitals...Health care executives pulling in millions in bonuses for denying treatment to the sick...This may sound like the predicament of a third-world nation, but this is America's health care reality today. The United States spends more on health care than any other nation, yet our benefits are shrinking and life expectancy is shorter here than in countries that spend significantly less per capita. Meanwhile, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains reap tremendous profits, while politicians - beholden to insurers and drug companies - enact legislation for the benefit of the few rather than the many, and the entire system is on the verge of collapse. In Critical Condition, award-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele expose the horror of what health care in America has become. They profile patients and doctors trapped by the system and offer startling personal stories that illuminate what's gone wrong. Doctors tell of being second-guessed and undermined by health care insurers; nurses recount chilling tales of hospital meltdowns; patients explain how they've been victimized by a system that is meant to care for them. Drug companies profit by selling pills in the same manner that Madison Avenue sells soap, while Wall Street rakes in billions by building up and then tearing down health care businesses. And politicians pass legislation perpetuating the injustices and outright fraud the system encourages. By analyzing the industry and offering an insightful prescription for getting it back on the right track, Critical Condition is an enormously compelling investigative work that addresses the concerns of every American.
Buy this book:Barns and Noble
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