How to Make a Killing

Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine

De: Tom Mueller

Narrado por: Melissa Kay Benson

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes.

With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients risk their lives to blow the whistle on how they've been mistreated. An unpaid activist living in a south Georgia trailer park fights to save patients from involuntary discharge from their lifesaving care. Industry insiders put their careers on the line to speak out about the endemic wrongs and pervasive inequality they've witnessed—and about dialysis executives who dress as musketeers and Star Wars characters to exhort their employees to more aggressive profit-seeking.

How to Make a Killing reveals dialysis as a microcosm of American medicine and poses a vital challenge: find a way to fix dialysis, and we'll have a fighting chance of fixing our country's dysfunctional healthcare system as a whole, restoring patients, not profits, as its true purpose.

©2023 Tom Mueller (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Eye opening information & insight...and noir

I loved the insight into for-profits medical care and HOW it becomes corrupt.
Also, the window into Dialysis history and all the difficulties that entangle it to this day.
HOWEVER, as much as I loved this book, all the noir descriptions and settings made this my most difficult book to listen through to date.

Enraging info

Good book to lean more about the history and problems with dialysis. It's very eye-opening.

The author’s complete lack of knowledge of a very complex topic

I liked the section discussing the corrupt business practices and the part about government bureaucracy. I utterly disliked the blanket statements regarding patient discharges, the fact that this author took as a credible source a nurse (who I suspect was not a registered nurse) that admitted to falsifying medical charts. The rest was simply a display of a poorly researched book by a man who clearly does not understand the process of dialysis or how things have changed in the field since his source from the 1980s recalled. Also, NO WHERE in this country is the clinical treatment area referred to as “the blood floor”! The fact that the author used the term throughout the book clearly illustrates how narrowly researched this book was.

Good read on systemic inequity and dysfunction in healthcare

The rise of private equity controlled big dialysis is case study that connects the dots to the main pillars of US healthcare dysfunction and makes a lot of abstract conversations on the need for healthcare reform concrete and sobering.

A must read for all!

Fantastic in depth reporting that is also a complete page turner. Dives into what wrong with healthcare in America.