An American Sickness

How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back

By: Elisabeth Rosenthal

Narrated by: Nancy Linari

A New York Times bestseller • A Washington Post Notable Book • Named a Best Book of the Year by The Wall Street Journal and NPR

"This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene

At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems.

In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast?

Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw.

The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Dense but informative. Skip the first half.

The first half is informative of all the problems in the health care industry but is extremely depressing and offers no solutions. The second half of the book contains all the solutions to the problems referenced in the first half, and I will be buying it in paperback in order to refer to them more often. I just wish the book was organized differently. You can basically skip the entire first half.

Everyone should read this book!

The healthcare system is too complex and very few understand what is going on. I’ve always been interested in the topic and have followed up on it, but this book gives a great overview and techniques everyone should use to control their healthcare spend. Been using a lot of them myself and the results in savings are well worth it, even though they can be time consuming and frustrating.

There needs to be a better way!

Every American should read this book... period

If you are old and on a fixed income, if you are mid career with great insurance, if you are young and hoping to shape a healthcare system for your future, you must read this book. Wow, rosenthal describes to a tee how we got it not this health care mess and great suggestions on how to survive it and perhaps get out of it.

All the news I never wanted to know but need to

I have been recommending this book to anyone who will listen. I plan to buy a hardcopy for reference.

Absolute Must Read

Everyone should read this book. Not only to have a great understanding of how players in the healthcare industry abuse the patients with outrageous billing but more importantly what patients can do to fight back. Highly recommended