How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine

How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine PDF Author: Tom Mueller
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393866521
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? 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, New York Times best-selling author Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients, including a Hollywood stuntman and body double, 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. Mueller evokes the scientific ingenuity and optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, when the burgeoning field of organ transplant and early dialysis machines offered long-awaited hope for lifesaving care. That is, until a New York salesman had himself dialyzed on the floor of the House, and Congress made renal disease the only “Medicare for All” condition—opening the financial floodgates for Big Dialysis. Of the thousands caught in a web of corporate greed, a disproportionate number are Black and Latino, highlighting the stark racial divides already endemic to American medicine. 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.

How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine

How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine PDF Author: Tom Mueller
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393866521
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 176

Get Book

Book Description
How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens many of the people it’s meant to save? 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, New York Times best-selling author Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients, including a Hollywood stuntman and body double, 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. Mueller evokes the scientific ingenuity and optimism of the 1950s and 1960s, when the burgeoning field of organ transplant and early dialysis machines offered long-awaited hope for lifesaving care. That is, until a New York salesman had himself dialyzed on the floor of the House, and Congress made renal disease the only “Medicare for All” condition—opening the financial floodgates for Big Dialysis. Of the thousands caught in a web of corporate greed, a disproportionate number are Black and Latino, highlighting the stark racial divides already endemic to American medicine. 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.

Crisis of Conscience

Crisis of Conscience PDF Author: Tom Mueller
Publisher:
ISBN: 1594634432
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Get Book

Book Description
We are living in a time of mind-boggling corruption, but we are also living in a golden age of whistleblowing. Over the past two decades, whistleblowers have emerged as both the government's best weapon against corporate misconduct and the citizenry's best defence against government. Drawing on relentless original research, including in-depth interviews with more than 200 whistleblowers, Crisis of Conscience is a modern-day David-and-Goliath saga, told through a series of riveting cases drawn from Big Pharma, the military, and beyond.

Brilliant Blunders

Brilliant Blunders PDF Author: Mario Livio
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439192375
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Get Book

Book Description
"Drawing on the lives of five great scientists -- Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein -- scientist/author Mario Livio shows how even the greatest scientists made major mistakes and how science built on these errors to achieve breakthroughs, especially into the evolution of life and the universe"--

Unaccountable

Unaccountable PDF Author: Marty Makary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608198383
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book

Book Description
Argues for more transparent, democratic and safer healthcare practices to keep patients better informed and hold poor-performing doctors and flawed systems accountable.

Code Green

Code Green PDF Author: Dana Beth Weinberg
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801464919
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
We are on the verge of the nation's worst nursing shortage in history. Dedicated nurses are leaving hospitals in droves, and there are not enough new recruits to the profession to meet demand. Even hospitals that were once very highly regarded for the quality of their nursing care, such as Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, now struggle to fill vacant positions. What happened? Dana Beth Weinberg argues that hospital restructuring in the 1990s is to blame. In their attempts to retain profit margins or even just to stay afloat, hospitals adopted a common set of practices to cut costs and increase revenues. Many strategies squeezed greater productivity out of nurses and other hospital workers. Nurses' workloads increased to the point that even the most skilled nurses questioned whether they could provide minimal, safe care to patients. As hospitals hemorrhaged money, it seemed that no one—not hospital administrators, not doctors—felt they could afford to listen to nurses. Through a careful look at the effects of the restructuring strategies chosen and implemented by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the author examines management's efforts to balance service and survival. By showing the effects of hospital restructuring on nurses' ability to plan, evaluate, and deliver excellent care, Weinberg provides a stinging indictment of standard industry practices that underestimate the contribution nurses make both to hospitals and to patient care.

The Price We Pay

The Price We Pay PDF Author: Marty Makary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635574129
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

Code Blue

Code Blue PDF Author: Mike Magee
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
ISBN: 0802146872
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book

Book Description
This “searing and persuasive exposé of the American health care system” demonstrates the disastrous consequences of putting profit before people (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). In this timely and important book, Mike Magee, M.D., sends out a “Code Blue” —an urgent medical emergency—for the American medical industry itself. A former hospital administrator and Pfizer executive, he has spent years investigating the pillars of our health system: Big Pharma, insurance companies, hospitals, the American Medical Association, and anyone affiliated with them. Code Blue is a riveting, character-driven narrative that draws back the curtain on the giant industry that consumes one out of every five American dollars. Making clear for the first time the mechanisms, greed, and collusion by which our medical system was built over the last eight decades. He persuasively argues for a single-payer, multi-plan insurance arena of the kind enjoyed by every other major developed nation.

The Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (Large Print 16pt)

The Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America (Large Print 16pt) PDF Author: Wesley J. Smith
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 145877841X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Get Book

Book Description
When his teenaged son Christopher, brain-damaged in an auto accident, developed a 106-degree fever following weeks of unconsciousness, John Campbell asked the attending physician for help. The doctor refused. Why bother? The boy's life was effectively over. Campbell refused to accept this verdict. He demanded treatment and threatened legal action. The doctor finally relented. With treatment, Christopher's temperature subsided almost immediately. Soon afterwards he regained consciousness and today he is learning to walk again. This story is one of many Wesley Smith recounts in his groundbreaking new book, The Culture of Death. Smith believes that American medicine ''is changing from a system based on the sanctity of human life into a starkly utilitarian model in which the medically defenseless are seen as having not just a 'right' but a 'duty' to die.'' Going behind the current scenes of our health care system, he shows how doctors withdraw desired care based on Futile Care Theory rather than provide it as required by the Hippocratic Oath. And how ''bioethicists'' influence policy by considering questions such as whether organs may be harvested from the terminally ill and disabled. This is a passionate, yet coolly reasoned book about the current crisis in medical ethics by an author who has made ''the new thanatology'' his consuming interest.

Making a Killing

Making a Killing PDF Author: Jamie Court
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book

Book Description
Court, a nationally recognized consumer advocate and founder of a health care watchdog project, and Smith, an attorney and president of a public policy consulting firm, expose appalling practices of HMOs and the corrupt world of managed care. They telltrue stories of patient victims who got caught and killed in the system, and expose the profit motive behind the misery, revealing the collusion of the insurance industry's powerful lobbyists with Congress and state legislatures to block any serious reforms. They supply an HMO patients' self-defense kit to help patients overcome HMO stonewalling.

The Hospital

The Hospital PDF Author: Brian Alexander
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
ISBN: 1250828686
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
"An intimate, heart wrenching portrait of one small hospital that reveals the magnitude of America's health care crises. 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 readers into the world of the American medical industry in a way no book has done before."--Publisher's description.