Health Care Industry

Pittsburgh was once synonymous with steel. But today, most of its mills are gone. Like so many places across the United States, a city that was a center of blue-collar manufacturing is now dominated by the service economy - particularly health care, which employs more Americans than any other industry. Gabriel Winant takes us inside the Rust Belt to show how America's cities have weathered new economic realities. In Pittsburgh's neighborhoods, he finds that a new working class has emerged in the wake of deindustrialization.

Despite being the wealthiest nation on earth, the United States spends much of its health-care money and resources pursuing the wrong goal: curing people after they get sick. In this provocative book, Nicholas J. Webb charts a bold new path that puts the focus not on reactionary treatment, but on anticipation and prevention.

Medicines are arguably the most highly regulated - and cost-inflated - products in the United States. The discovery, development, manufacturing, and distribution of medicines is carried out by an ever more complex and crowded set of industries, each playing a part in a larger “pharmaceutical enterprise” seeking to maximize profits. But this was not always the case. The Price of Health is the reveals the story of how the pharmaceutical enterprise took shape and led to the present crisis.

Technological advances have done little to help the worrying trend of out-of-control costs and physician shortages. But there is a solution that could help millions of Americans get more affordable, convenient access to care: telehealth. Telehealth is a solution that helps combat these trends, but it has not yet lived up to its expectations. Many of the current products in the market are ineffective, because brokers, insurance companies, and major telehealth companies are more concerned with their own profits than with providing real solutions.