American Health Care

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By following the struggle for survival of one small-town hospital, and the patients who walk, or are carried, through its doors, The Hospital takes listeners into the world of the American medical industry in a way no audiobook has done before. Americans are dying sooner, and living in poorer health. Alexander argues that no plan will solve America’s health crisis until the deeper causes of that crisis are addressed.

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?

African American Slave Medicine offers a critical examination of how African American slaves' medical needs were addressed during the years before and surrounding the Civil War. Drawing upon ex-slave interviews conducted during the 1930s and 1940s by the Works Project Administration (WPA), Dr. Herbert C. Covey inventories many of the herbal, plant, and non-plant remedies used by African American folk practitioners during slavery.

Making ethical decisions involves more than listening to an inner moral compass, a feeling in the gut of what’s right and wrong. Questions of ethics in science are becoming increasingly complex, especially as technology encroaches upon even our most private cellular spaces. In Doing the Right Thing: Ethics in Science, we cover a wide range of areas in science and medicine where complicated ethical questions come to bear, including genomics and research where informed - and ethically sound - choices are the basis of many scientific studies.

Today, 90 percent of psychiatric beds are located in jails and prisons across the United States, institutions that confine disproportionate numbers of African Americans. After more than a decade of research, the celebrated scholar and activist Mab Segrest locates the deep historical roots of this startling fact, turning her sights on a long-forgotten cauldron of racial ideology: the state mental asylum system in which psychiatry was born and whose influences extend into our troubled present.