An American Sickness
by
- Publisher Penguin Press
- Year published 2017
- ISBN: ISBN 978-1594206757
- Number of pages 406 pages
- WorldCat
- Topic(s) Health Literacy
About the Book
Book descriptionBreaking 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. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal, in clear and practical terms, 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 the reader 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. 
About the Author
Author descriptionDr. Elisabeth L. Rosenthal was appointed editor-in-chief of Kaiser Health News in 2016, after more than 2 decades with the New York Times where she covered a variety of beats from health care to environment and did a stint in the Beijing bureau. While in China, she covered SARS, bird flu and the emergence of HIV/AIDS in rural areas. Libby’s 2013-14 series, “Paying Till It Hurts,” won many prizes for both health reporting and its creative use of digital tools. Her book, “An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back” (Penguin Random House, 2017), was a New York Times best-seller and a Washington Post notable book of the year. She is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Medical School and briefly practiced medicine in a New York City emergency room before converting to journalism.
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