Health Care System

In Unhealthy: Corruption and Malpractice in the American Health System, Dr. Richard Kradin, a professor at Harvard Medical School and expert in pulmonary infectious diseases, explores the history of the corporate and ideological transformation of America’s medical profession and how it has diminished the quality of health care. He describes how progressive medical education has produced a generation of physicians as concerned with political activism as they are with medical science.

Drafted at the conclusion of a series of trials of Nazi doctors who'd been charged of crimes - like murder and falsifying death certificates on behalf of their employer, the German government - the Nuremberg Code was the 20th century's first attempt to articulate specific ethical guidelines in an attempt to protect patients from systematic abuses by doctors, health care practitioners, and medical systems.

Throughout this audiobook, parents of kids with PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with strep) and PANS (pediatric acute-onset neuropsychiatric syndrome) share their answers to these questions and more. In stories of heartbreak and healing, they describe how the symptoms of these disorders really look behind closed doors and how relentlessly fighting for the right diagnosis and treatment led their kids to heal, slowly.

Since FDR, the US healthcare system has been mired in politics and policy. All the while it has only increased in complexity and cost. Today half of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to healthcare costs. Many community hospitals are barely getting by with single digit profit margins. With a system teetering on the edge of a systemic crisis, we need to turn to a brand-new approach to rescue the US healthcare system.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

When Dr. Virgie Bright Ellington became a cancer patient, she faced insurmountable medical bills. That’s when she took her insider industry knowledge and put it to work. In Crush Medical Debt, she shares her secrets to help individuals, families, and veterans protect against America’s number-one cause of bankruptcy—medical debt. Filled with practical and step-by-step strategies, this guide provides the tools you need to stop spending money you don't owe and save yourself from becoming a victim of a predatory health care system.

When the rug is pulled under from Nancy Laracy, a busy wife and mother of two who is diagnosed with a mixed connective tissue disease and fibromyalgia in her mid-thirties, she rebelliously adopts a baby red satin rabbit, Bunny Boy. So begins a deep, magical, and lifelong bond, where Bunny Boy and Nancy become inseparable companions in pain management.

The US healthcare system desperately needs radical reform to rein in costs, reduce harm, expand access, and become customer centric...Imagine what real change in our healthcare system would mean for you, the economy, and our future. Real change requires disruptive innovation. As citizens, employers, entrepreneurs, healthcare workers, elected officials, and patients, it is time for us to drive the change. Authors Aaron Fausz and Terry Howell explain how we can disrupt, dismantle, and rebuild.

In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.

States of Health identifies the practical relevance of federalism to people facing ethical decisions about health and health care, and it considers the theoretical justifications for permissible differences among states. It asks whether authority over important aspects of health is misaligned in the United States today, with some matters problematically left to the states while others are taken over by the federal government.

Conflicts of interest, misrepresentation of clinical trials, hospital price-fixing, and massive expenditures for procedures of dubious efficacy - these and other critical flaws leave little doubt that the current US health-care system is in need of an overhaul. In this essential guide, preeminent physician Nortin Hadler urges American health-care consumers to take time to understand the existing system and to visualize what the outcome of successful reform might look like.

At a time when many Americans may be seeking alternatives to current health care choices, Dr. Knope offers an option that allows patients to directly contract with healthcare providers for individualized care. Using first-hand accounts and plenty of examples of how concierge medicine works, Knope offers a plan for patients looking to make a change to a medical system that is negotiated between doctor and patient, rather than through insurance and pharmaceutical companies.

Corridors of Contagion brings to light the experiences of five people incarcerated across the United States as they navigate the onset of the pandemic-and the many months, stretched into years, that followed. Journalist Victoria Law combines this storytelling with a trenchant analysis of the structural failures of the US carceral system: failures that made prisons uniquely vulnerable to COVID-19 outbreaks, from overcrowding to solitary confinement, from insufficient healthcare to life sentences.

There currently is no cure for Alzheimer's disease - though it can be treated. For the last 15 years, John Zeisel, PhD, has spearheaded a movement to treat Alzheimer's non-pharmacologically by focusing on the mind's strengths. I'm Still Here is a guidebook to Dr. Zeisel's treatment ideas, showing the possibility and benefits of connecting with an Alzheimer's patient through their abilities that don't diminish with time, such as understanding music, art, facial expressions, and touch.

What’s your max squat? How much ya bench? What’s your best deadlift? Can you press your body weight? Today, pushing quantifiable expressions of strength, like your maxes, is becoming increasingly ubiquitous. However, though strength may be specific, real strength is much more than a powerlifting total - it’s about resilience, capability, and adaptability. It’s survival of the fittest after all, not the strongest.

The pathophysiology of COVID-19 garners much attention in health care settings, but the illness is not limited to its biological impact—the pandemic’s effects are a mosaic of social, economic, political, environmental, and evolutionary influences. It led to major global changes that compromised economies, health care systems, and global connectivity. Written by a group of Canadian students, Under the Weather: COVID-19 Biosocial System Dynamics takes an interdisciplinary outlook on the disease and how people have come together in dire times to combat the disease.

In The Ten Year War, veteran journalist Jonathan Cohn offers the compelling story of the defining political battle of our time, one that will shape political conversations for decades. At the heart of the book is the decades-old argument over what’s wrong with American health care and how to fix it. But the battle over health care was always about more than policy. The Ten Year War offers a deeper examination of how our governing institutions, the media and the two parties have evolved, and the dysfunction those changes have left in their wake.

With increasing urgency, the plight of the American family grips the national conscience. The family courts are often our society's last safety net to prevent disaster. In this penetrating exposé of the inner workings of the U.S. family court system, two award-winning journalists provide an intimate look at the lives of the children whose fate it decides.

For the first time in my life, I didn't need to pretend, I didn't need to be tough: I only needed to be honest. "I have cerebral palsy. I walk funny and my balance is bad. I fall a lot. My hands shake, too. That means I'm not so good at carrying things. And if I drop stuff, sometimes it's hard to just bend down and get it." I waited anxiously for the interviewer's response. She smiled. "It sounds like a service dog could be great for you."

How has the United States, with more resources than any nation, developed a healthcare system that delivers much poorer results, at near double the cost of any other developed country - such that legendary seer Warren Buffett calls the Medical Industrial Complex "the tapeworm of American economic competitiveness"?