The Sickness Is the System

The Sickness Is the System PDF Author: Richard D. Wolff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735601304
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of essays, Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that "returning to normal" no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.

The Sickness Is the System

The Sickness Is the System PDF Author: Richard D. Wolff
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781735601304
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Get Book Here

Book Description
The coronavirus pandemic, the deepening economic crash, dangerously divisive political responses, and exploding social tensions have thrown an already declining American capitalist system into a tailspin. The consequences of these mounting and intertwined crises will shape our future. In this unique collection of essays, Richard D. Wolff argues clearly that "returning to normal" no longer responds adequately to the accumulated problems of US capitalism. What is necessary, instead, is transition toward a new economic system that works for all of us.

An American Sickness

An American Sickness PDF Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0698407180
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "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.

The Wages of Sickness

The Wages of Sickness PDF Author: Beatrix Hoffman
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807860727
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The Clinton administration's failed health care reform was not the first attempt to establish government-sponsored medical coverage in the United States. From 1915 to 1920, Progressive reformers led a spirited but ultimately unsuccessful crusade for compulsory health insurance in New York State. Beatrix Hoffman argues that this first health insurance campaign was a crucial moment in the creation of the American welfare state and health care system. Its defeat, she says, gave rise to an uneven and inegalitarian system of medical coverage and helped shape the limits of American social policy for the rest of the century. Hoffman examines each of the major combatants in the battle over compulsory health insurance. While physicians, employers, the insurance industry, and conservative politicians forged a uniquely powerful coalition in opposition to health insurance proposals, she shows, reformers' potential allies within women's organizations and the labor movement were bitterly divided. Against the backdrop of World War I and the Red Scare, opponents of reform denounced government-sponsored health insurance as "un-American" and, in the process, helped fashion a political culture that resists proposals for universal health care and a comprehensive welfare state even today.

Democracy at Work

Democracy at Work PDF Author: Richard Wolff
Publisher: Haymarket Books
ISBN: 1608462579
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
What, and who, are we working for? A thoughtful assessment on our current society from “probably America’s most prominent Marxist economist” (The New York Times). Capitalism as a system has spawned deepening economic crisis alongside its bought-and-paid-for political establishment. Neither serves the needs of our society. Whether it is secure, well-paid, and meaningful jobs or a sustainable relationship with the natural environment that we depend on, our society is not delivering the results people need and deserve. One key cause for this intolerable state of affairs is the lack of genuine democracy in our economy as well as in our politics. The solution requires the institution of genuine economic democracy, starting with workers managing their own workplaces, as the basis for a genuine political democracy. Here Richard D. Wolff lays out a hopeful and concrete vision of how to make that possible, addressing the many people who have concluded economic inequality and politics as usual can no longer be tolerated and are looking for a concrete program of action. “Wolff’s constructive and innovative ideas suggest new and promising foundations for much more authentic democracy and sustainable and equitable development, ideas that can be implemented directly and carried forward. A very valuable contribution in troubled times.” —Noam Chomsky, leading public intellectual and author of Hope and Prospects

Sickness and Wealth

Sickness and Wealth PDF Author: Meredith P. Fort
Publisher: South End Press
ISBN: 9780896087163
Category : Developing Countries
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Demonstrates the impact of the widening wealth gap on the health and well-being of the world's poor.

Seeking Sickness

Seeking Sickness PDF Author: Alan Cassels
Publisher: Greystone Books Ltd
ISBN: 1771000333
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
“Alan Cassels strips layers of expectation, hype, jargon, false-starts, and conflicts of interest off the medical screening mantra.” —Nortin M. Hadler, author of Worried Sick Why wouldn’t you want to be screened to see if you’re at risk for cancer, heart disease, or another potentially lethal condition? After all, better safe than sorry. Right? Not so fast, says Alan Cassels. His Seeking Sickness takes us inside the world of medical screening, where well-meaning practitioners and a profit-motivated industry offer to save our lives by exploiting our fears. He writes that promoters of screening overpromise on its benefits and downplay its harms, which can range from the merely annoying to the life threatening. If you’re facing a screening test for breast or prostate cancer, high cholesterol, or low testosterone, someone is about to turn you into a patient. You need to ask yourself one simple question: Am I ready for all the things that could go wrong? “With engaging clarity backed by academic rigor, Cassels discusses a variety of popular investigational procedures . . . an excellent way to start the important process of self-education.” —Quill & Quire “Smartly written and very readable.” —Brian Goldman, MD, author of The Secret Language of Doctors “Cassels tackles this touchy topic, looking at it test by test. His overarching message is that modern medicine has ‘overpromised’ with claims that screening will save our lives. He contends that with the lack of hard evidence on benefits, the evidence of harm from by such screening, as well as the multi-billion dollar interests at stake, we should approach this kind of screening with great precaution.” —Canadian Women’s Health Network

Stories of Sickness

Stories of Sickness PDF Author: Howard Brody
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199759790
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Our personalities and our identities are intimately bound up with the stories that we tell to organize and to make sense of our lives. To understand the human meaning of illness, we therefore must turn to the stories we tell about illness, suffering, and medical care. Stories of Sickness explores the many dimensions of what illness means to the sufferers and to those around them, drawing on depictions of illness in great works of literature and in nonfiction accounts. The exploration is primarily philosophical but incorporates approaches from literature and from the medical social sciences. When it was first published in 1987, Stories of Sickness helped to inaugurate a renewed interest in the importance of narrative studies in health care. For the Second Edition the text has been thoroughly revised and significantly expanded. Four almost entirely new chapters have been added on the nature, complexities, and rigor of narrative ethics and how it is carried out. There is also an additional chapter on maladaptive ways of being sick that deals in greater depth with disability issues. Health care professionals, students of medicine and bioethics, and ordinary people coping with illness, no less than scholars in the health care humanities and social sciences, will find much value in this volume. Unique Features: *Philosophically sophisticated yet clearly written and easily accessible *Interdisciplinary approach--combines philosophy, literature, health care, social sciences *Contains many fascinating stories and vignettes of illness drawn from both fiction and nonfiction *A new and comprehensive overview of the "hot topic" of narrative ethics in medicine and health care

The Second Sickness

The Second Sickness PDF Author: Howard Waitzkin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461645565
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Since the appearance of Waitzkin’s The Second Sickness, a landmark book of the 1980s, American medicine has been dramatically transformed. Waitzkin’s earlier edition used qualitative research to take readers inside the “black box” of medical decisionmaking. This new, fully updated and expanded edition retains the earlier edition's vivid approach and adds timely analysis of how managed care and other economic and social forces influence medical practice today.

Not Just in Sickness But Also in Health

Not Just in Sickness But Also in Health PDF Author: Jeff Margolis
Publisher: Forbesbooks
ISBN: 9781946633897
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
MAKE A VOW TO GOOD HEALTH How much time each year do you spend interacting with a doctor, pharmacist, or other clinician? Not much, right? In fact, a vast majority of people spend less than 1 percent of their time--usually far less--in clinical settings or interactions. Furthermore, clinical care affects only 30 percent of our overall health status, so why do we fail to acknowledge the drivers of the other 70 percent? We deserve a healthcare system that systematically supports our daily living needs where we spend over 99 percent of our time as a complement to clinical care. It is our daily living activities related to such things as nutrition, fitness, resiliency, sleep, relationships, finances, and purpose--as impacted by social determinants--that make up the vast majority of what determines our total well-being. Not Just in Sickness but Also in Health details how we can create the next generation of benefit plans, including an intelligent ecosystem of personalized resources, capable of supporting how each person can achieve and sustain their optimal health. Drawing on his decades of experience, Margolis explains how existing healthcare industry players, government policymakers, and technology companies can enact a systematic healthcare consumer-centric approach to accomplish these aims, and move the United States and the world from a system of sickcare to one of health optimization for all.

Sickness Unto Death

Sickness Unto Death PDF Author: Soren Kierkegaard
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1625585918
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 154

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Book Description
Man is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity; in short, it is a synthesis.