PJ Steiner
An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back was recommended to Politics for the People by PJ Steiner. Read on to see PJ’s response to Elisabeth Rosenthal’s book.
I initially heard about An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal while listening to an NPR interview with Terry Gross. Dr. Rosenthal was incredibly well versed on what the challenges in our healthcare “system” really are and how those challenges came to be. She absolutely wowed me with her excellent communication skills and journalistic chops.
But unfortunately, I became immediately worried about my own, and my children’s, healthcare future. As a Dad of two awesome autistic children, I worry about how they will be cared for throughout their life. I worry even more because our healthcare system (like public education) doesn’t really want to help them as much as it wants to profit from them.
Now that I’ve had a chance to read Dr. Rosenthal’s book, I feel the true immensity of the amoral “healthcare industrial complex” we have in this country. But I also feel some hope. There are a lot of tools and advice to be had to help the regular American fight their way to better care at a more reasonable cost.
Pick this book up. You’ll be glad you did.
PJ Steiner is the Vice President of The Utah League of Independent Voters.
Steve Guarin
If you want to learn why your wallet is getting lighter and your purse is becoming empty, read An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal. She lists and explains all the many ways medical care robs your billfold. They will even charge you for things you didn’t use. People have called the billing predatory, which is an outrageous situation to be put in by the people and organizations that are supposed to be helping you.
The subtitle of the story is, “How Health Care Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back.” In a small part of the book I felt as if she was talking directly at me, the Compliant Patient. Up until I read this book I strived to be a compliant patient. I thought these were the people trying to make me better, but I have learned that is not true. Your family doctor is under a lot of pressure to make use of the expensive facilities of the hospital or medical group that employs him. One type of lab-test which we all get is the simple blood test. It behooves you to ask your doctor to use one of the commercial laboratories, i.e. Quest or LabCorp. It will be exactly the same test but the results from a hospital can be priced one hundred times higher.
Read this book and you will learn how medical care became a rapacious big business. More importantly, the author will teach you to be a Non-Compliant patient, and save some money.
Steve Guarin lives in the Bronx. He is retired and an activist with the New York City Independence Clubs.
Jessica Marta
As a health-care provider, I’m familiar with many of the issues that Ms. Rosenthal is talking about in An American Sickness. All the unscrupulous things Ms. Rosenthal mentions, particularly price-fixing by pharmaceutical companies, are happening every day.
Is single payer health-care the solution? I don’t know. The single-payer idea has been around since the ’50s. Back then the American Medical Association shot it down by hiring Ronald Reagan to do TV ads telling the American public that single-payer health-care would take away our Freedom of Choice.
If not single-payer, then why couldn’t the government set limits or standards on the price of drugs or medical procedures? Because our government still caters to powerful special interests.
As long as we live under the current paradigm, that making money is the supreme good, poor people won’t have access to good care and middle-class people who can’t afford to pay for their own health insurance will go bankrupt after paying for long-term treatment. But we just see these as consequences for “others” and hope we are never in those situations.
I feel that patients are not the only casualties of our dysfunctional system. There are many providers who go out of their way for patients, jump through bureaucratic hoops to get care, but these folks can get very weary. I don’t know what the answer is, except a shift in political power on behalf of the interests of ordinary people.
Jessica Marta is an independent activist with Independent Voting and the New York City Independence Clubs. She lives in Manhattan and is an Adult Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner.
