American Health Care

Between its founding in 1966 and its formal end in 1980, the Black Panther Party blazed a distinctive trail in American political culture. Here Alondra Nelson deftly recovers an indispensable but lesser-known aspect of the organization's broader struggle for social justice: health care. The Black Panther Party's health activism was an expression of its founding political philosophy and also a recognition that poor Blacks were both underserved by mainstream medicine and overexposed to its harms.

In Dying to Save You, Dr. William Queale takes you behind the scenes of our sickcare system. He uses deeply personal stories to explain how we got here and how systems thinking can get us out. But Dying to Save You isn’t just about medicine, science, and healthcare policy. This book is about you—and how you can stay out of the sickcare system altogether.

In this short audiobook, R.W. Murphy makes the argument that the US healthcare delivery system is irreparably broken as the result of a perfectly inelastic demand curve for healthcare goods and services. In essence, he indicates that Americans will buy the same number of units regardless of price and that is destroying the system. He points to all the retail level cost control initiatives to date as failing to address wholesale pricing pressures. His premise is that underlying wholesale cost increases have hardly been affected at all.

Tens of thousands of Americans die each year from treatable illness merely because they can’t afford medical care. How did we reach this shameful state? You’ll be shocked to find out not only who’s to blame, but more importantly, how easy the solution can be. In this riveting book, Dr. Joseph Jarvis, MD, examines how our nation’s focus has radically shifted from the disease to the dollar. With unforgettable stories drawn from Dr. Jarvis’s 30-plus years in the medical profession, he gets you thinking about health-care reform in a big way

Developing life-changing drugs is risky and expensive, but that’s not what makes them unaffordable. Drug pricing is a staple of every news cycle and political debate. And while we’ve struggled for decades to agree on solutions that serve all patients without jeopardizing the invention of new medicines, many Americans suffer because they can’t afford the drugs they need. Do we really have to choose between affordability and innovation?

There's an unspoken assumption when we go to see a doctor: the doctor knows our medical story and is making decisions based on that story. But reality often falls short. Medical records vanish when we switch doctors. Critical details of life-saving treatment plans get lost in muddled electronic charts. The doctors we see change according to specialty, hospital shifts, or an insurer's whims. In this gripping narrative from medicine's front lines, Ilana Yurkiewicz reveals how a system that doesn't talk to itself puts insupportable burdens on physicians, patients, and caregivers.

The American health-care system is failing us. It is a frustratingly complex, opaque, and unaffordable system that results in suboptimal care and a deterioration of the welfare of the majority of American families. The experience of the past few decades and the recent ravaging pandemic has shown us that doing more of the same is not going to deliver us from this dilemma. But there is hope. There is a way to create a more accessible, consumer-friendly, safer, and affordable system of care for all of us.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.

The Battle Against COVID-19 Filipino American Healthcare Workers on the Frontlines of the Pandemic Response is a tribute to all health and essential workers who provide critical services to save lives. These frontliners have risked their lives during this pandemic and sadly, a significant number have succumbed to the deadly virus.

From an award-winning writer at the New York Times Magazine and a contributor to the 1619 Project comes a landmark book that tells the full story of racial health disparities in America, revealing the toll racism takes on individuals and the health of our nation.

In Open Your Eyes: A Prescription for Change in American Health Care, Dr. Eduardo Balbona shares his expert advice on how U.S. health care can be improved from its current state, in which both patients and doctors are unable to thrive. Gleaned from his more than 30 years of practicing medicine, Balbona’s text illustrates how our ideas on medical care have developed, and ultimately at what cost.

Health disparities have remained stubbornly entrenched in the American health care system - and in Just Medicine Dayna Bowen Matthew finds that they principally arise from unconscious racial and ethnic biases held by physicians, institutional providers, and their patients.

In 1900, the U.S. sent three doctors to Cuba to discover how yellow fever was spread. There, they launched one of history's most controversial human studies. Compelling and terrifying, The American Plague depicts the story of yellow fever and its reign in this country - and in Africa, where even today it strikes thousands every year. With "arresting tales of heroism," it is a story as much about the nature of human beings as it is about the nature of disease.

In 1968, Bruce Tucker, a Black man, went into Virginia’s top research hospital with a head injury, only to have his heart taken out of his body and put into the chest of a White businessman. Now, in The Organ Thieves, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Chip Jones exposes the horrifying inequality surrounding Tucker’s death and how he was used as a human guinea pig without his family’s permission or knowledge.

Your share of your health insurance premium and the amount you are paying for your yearly deductible, co-pays, and prescriptions are soaring. Don’t forget that your employer’s share of your premium is coming out of your salary. And unfortunately, you are not alone. What can you do to avoid unnecessary costs and encourage American healthcare reform? Ripped Off! is your guide to better understanding the problems of the American healthcare system and what you can do for yourself and how to help enact change.

We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.

We think of transplant surgery as one of the medical wonders of the modern world. But transplant surgery is as ancient as the pyramids, with a history more surprising than we might expect. Paul Craddock takes us on a journey—from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants—uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, Spare Parts explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal, and machine.

Living with a chronic, progressive neurological disease (MS), a geologist explores some of the confounding questions of our time. The difference between wellness and illness, the different, but complementary roles modern science and alternative traditions like naturopathy play in healing, the potholed approach to accessibility and affordability of health care in our great country, the role of resilience and opportunity in answering the time honored question each of us ask: "Just who am I?"

In the midst of our hectic, overscheduled lives, caring for the soul is imperative. Now, more than ever, we need to pause - intentionally - and encounter the Divine. Soul care director Barbara Peacock illustrates a journey of prayer, spiritual direction, and soul care from an African American perspective. She reflects on how these disciplines are woven into the African American culture and lived out in the rich heritage of its faith community.

Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water - and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk.