American Health Care

A Silent Spring for the human body, this wide-ranging, genre-crossing literary mystery interweaves the author’s quest to understand the source of her own condition with her telling of the story of the chronically ill 19th-century diarist Alice James—ultimately uncovering the many hidden health hazards of life in America.

Lloyd I. Sederer, MD, recounts the unfettered story of how McLean survived impending closure or sale to once again prosper and regain its international stature as the hospital where you would want a loved one to be treated for a psychiatric or substance use disorder.

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.

Guy Stuff Feelings: Everything You Need to Know About Your Emotions is full of advice on dealing with the new feelings and emotions that are a part of puberty. Boys will find helpful tips from a pediatrician on identifying, managing, and expressing emotions—from anger to sadness to embarrassment to happiness—in positive ways.

David M. Craig traveled across the US to assess its health care access, delivery, and finance. He interviewed religious hospital administrators and interfaith activists, learning how they balance the values of economic efficiency and community accountability. He discovered that health care in the US is not a private good or a public good, but a shared social good. This book argues that as escalating health costs absorb more and more of family income and government budgets, we need to take stock of the full range of health care values.

Physicians enter their professions with the highest of hopes and ideals for compassionate and efficient patient care. Along the way, however, recurring problems arise in their interactions with some patients that lead physicians to label them as "difficult." Some studies indicate that physicians identify 15 percent or more of their patients as "difficult." The negative feelings that physicians have toward these patients may lead to frustration, cynicism, and burnout.

Doctors and patients have lost control of American medicine. Generative AI can put the power back in their hands, save millions of lives, and restore the doctor-patient relationship. Welcome to ChatGPT, MD. In this unique collaboration, renowned healthcare leader Dr. Robert Pearl teams up with the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT to examine the transformational power of generative AI in medicine.

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?

Considered the definitive history of the American healthcare system, The Social Transformation of American Medicine examines how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs have evolved over the last two and a half centuries. Updated with a new preface and an epilogue analyzing developments since the early 1980s, this new edition is a must-listen for anyone concerned about the future of our fraught healthcare system.

The American health insurance system is anything but simple to maneuver. Health plan enrollees become entangled in an intricate and opaque maze of confusion, often resulting in frustration, regret, and deep debt. Health plan and health care technology veteran Marc S. Ryan seeks to demystify the US health care system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more confidence and certainty. Using his decades of experience, Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America’s unique system without upending the employer-based system.

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 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

The sometimes fragmentary tales of these people, their lives and deaths, are not included in official histories of a place. How, Ensign asks, has a large, socially progressive city like Seattle responded to the health needs of people marginalized by poverty, mental illness, addiction, racial/ethnic/sexual identities, and homelessness? Drawing on interviews and extensive research, Ensign shares a diversity of voices within contemporary health care and public policy debates.

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.