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

Published: 2023-08-01

Total Pages: 176

ISBN-13: 0393866521

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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:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 610

ISBN-13: 1594634432

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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

Published: 2014-05-27

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1439192375

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"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"--

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

Published: 2010-10-06

Total Pages: 474

ISBN-13: 145877841X

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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.

The Ultimate Obamacare Handbook (2015?2016 edition)

The Ultimate Obamacare Handbook (2015?2016 edition) PDF

Author: Kimberly Amadeo

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2015-09-15

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1510701559

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"The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, makes health insurance available to the majority of Americans. In fact, failure to obtain coverage will result in penalties, but the process of obtaining insurance can be daunting. This brief handbook explains the law and its history and tells readers how to apply for coverage and any exemptions and subsidies if they are eligible. Editor Amadeo, an expert on the act, discusses the benefits of having insurance and how the plan is financed. Each chapter has references, and the book has a glossary and a bibliography to help readers. This is a useful resource, but libraries should also have information about local exchanges if their states have them." — Barbara Bibel, BOOKLIST, March 15, 2016 issue Obamacare can save you money, but only if you know how it really works. Americans have been barraged with fifteen times more negative than positive news about Obamacare. As a result, 40 percent of the people who dislike it actually qualified for insurance subsidies and don't realize it. Hardworking, middle-class families need facts, not opinions, to get all the benefits they deserve. Here you'll find: A guide to buying low-cost health insurance Step-by-step instructions to signing up for insurance Directions to apply for Obamacare exemptions Eligibility requirements for subsidies Definitions of insurance, health care, and Obama terms Real-life stories of people who have already been helped This handbook refutes the myths about the Affordable Care Act with research-based evidence. It reveals the seven reasons why health care costs so much, as well as how the ACA attacks those costs. You'll learn who really gets benefits from subsidies and who pays for them. Most importantly, this book uncovers how the ACA might save you and your family money in 2016 and beyond.

Making a Killing

Making a Killing PDF

Author: Jamie Court

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13:

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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.

Unaccountable

Unaccountable PDF

Author: Marty Makary

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2013-10-15

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1608198383

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

Medical Apartheid

Medical Apartheid PDF

Author: Harriet A. Washington

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2008-01-08

Total Pages: 530

ISBN-13: 076791547X

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NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • The first full history of Black America’s shocking mistreatment as unwilling and unwitting experimental subjects at the hands of the medical establishment. No one concerned with issues of public health and racial justice can afford not to read this masterful book. "[Washington] has unearthed a shocking amount of information and shaped it into a riveting, carefully documented book." —New York Times From the era of slavery to the present day, starting with the earliest encounters between Black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, Medical Apartheid details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge—a tradition that continues today within some black populations. It reveals how Blacks have historically been prey to grave-robbing as well as unauthorized autopsies and dissections. Moving into the twentieth century, it shows how the pseudoscience of eugenics and social Darwinism was used to justify experimental exploitation and shoddy medical treatment of Blacks. Shocking new details about the government’s notorious Tuskegee experiment are revealed, as are similar, less-well-known medical atrocities conducted by the government, the armed forces, prisons, and private institutions. The product of years of prodigious research into medical journals and experimental reports long undisturbed, Medical Apartheid reveals the hidden underbelly of scientific research and makes possible, for the first time, an understanding of the roots of the African American health deficit. At last, it provides the fullest possible context for comprehending the behavioral fallout that has caused Black Americans to view researchers—and indeed the whole medical establishment—with such deep distrust.

The Price We Pay

The Price We Pay PDF

Author: Marty Makary

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2019-09-10

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 1635574129

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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.

The Hospital

The Hospital PDF

Author: Brian Alexander

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin

Published: 2022-03-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1250828686

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"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.