Health Care Gone Wrong

Description

Why does the world’s most expensive health care yield only middling scores and outcomes?

Physician/Writer, Philip Hirsh assembles his professional experience and personal stories to trace the decline of medical care from the late 1950s to the present. Starting with medical training and practice from the pre-1970s corporatization of medical care, he recounts how a proud profession gradually lost out to a profit-driven business model abetted by increasing dominance from insurance companies, convoluted laws, and regulations concocted by lobbyists and politicians who protected sponsors at the expense of consumers. The result is an incoherent health care “system” that serves some very well, many fairly well, and the rest hardly at all. Medical technology has advanced, but access and affordability have lost pace with the profits being made.

With brevity, clarity, and lack of awe, Hirsh describes how we deserve better, a process that starts with a clear-headed understanding of what has happened in health care history. From there, facts and data, not greed or ideology, can drive the debate.

“There is something morally corrupt about how many times an area’s biggest employers are hospitals. There is WAY too much money to be made. It is a drain on our economy and on the well-being of our society to medicalize and profitize illness.”

–Jim Krag, MD, former President of the Psychiatric Society of VA

“A great read. The writer’s prose flows seamlessly, and the occasional comedy keeps the reader’s attention. I highly recommend this work to anyone with a medical background or anyone interested in health care in general.”

–Jerry Ringland, MD

“Fascinating! I was not expecting to learn as much as I did. Even when serious, injection of a funny side or light touch makes the reader smile or nod in agreement.”

–Sherrill Taylor