Health Care System

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

With technological advances and information sharing so prevalent, health care should be more transparent and easier to access than ever before. So why does it seem like everything about it - from pricing, drug development, and the emergence of new diseases to the intricacies of biologic and precision medicine therapies - is becoming more complex, not less?

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish?

This book provides the listener with nine foundational values that transform a healthcare organization, outfitting it to succeed in the modern environment of high accountability and value-based medicine. Plagued by traditional leadership paradigms, the healthcare industry continues to deliver status quo results. Transformational thinking must dominate by embracing the values that have been vetted over 25 years in healthcare settings that are described in The Culture Cure.

New York Times best-selling author Seth Siegel tells how contaminants got in our drinking water, what they’re doing to us, and what we must do to make our water safe.

Living with a chronic, progressive neurological disease (MS), a geologist explores some of the confounding questions of our time. The difference between wellness and illness, the different, but complementary roles modern science and alternative traditions like naturopathy play in healing, the potholed approach to accessibility and affordability of health care in our great country, the role of resilience and opportunity in answering the time honored question each of us ask: "Just who am I?"

When her daughter desperately needed a lung transplant to survive, Janet Murnaghan rallied against the outdated restrictions in health care that would limit her daughter's options. Transplant laws, restricting access to lungs based on arbitrary age restrictions, meant Sarah's options were limited. The injustice of her daughter's fate spurred Janet to start a public battle against outdated health-care regulations and a battle to save Sarah's life.

The U.S. healthcare system is in critical condition--but this should come as a surprise to no one. Yet until now the solutions proposed have been unworkable, pie-in-the-sky plans that have had little chance of becoming law and even less of succeeding. In Code Red, David Dranove, one of the nation's leading experts on the economics of healthcare, proposes a set of feasible solutions that address access, efficiency, and quality.

In the multibillion-dollar business of American medicine, doctors are often portrayed as culprits—opportunistic millionaires who prey on the misfortune of their hapless patients and drive up the cost of health care. But often they are the real victims of a system designed to increase profits for the insurance companies, shady businessmen, and Big Government.

In the American healthcare system, ignorance is not bliss. We are all paying the price for ever-increasing medical costs and the accompanying loss of quality care.

Every year, millions of Americans are overcharged and underserved while the health-care industry makes record profits. We know something is wrong, but the layers of bureaucracy designed to discourage complaints make pushing back seem impossible. Never Pay the First Bill is the guerilla guide to health care the American people and employers need. Drawing on 15 years of investigating the health-care industry, reporter Marshall Allen shows how companies and individuals have managed to force medical providers to play fair and shows how you can, too.

Andy Lazris, MD, is a practicing primary care physician who experiences the effects of Medicare policy on a daily basis. As a result, he believes that the way we care for our elderly has taken a wrong turn and that Medicare is complicit in creating the very problems it seeks to solve. Aging is not a disease to be cured; it is a life stage to be lived. Lazris argues that aggressive treatments cannot change that fact but only get in the way and decrease quality of life.

A courageous memoir that spans 40 years of Dinaaz Lentin's life experiences within our health care system. The story is raw, thought-provoking, and a brilliant look at complications and uncertainties when a medical challenge being faced is rare and uncertain. An extremely powerful example of how self-belief and trusting your own gut instinct can allow you to overcome any of life's challenges.

There currently is no cure for Alzheimer's disease - though it can be treated. For the last 15 years, John Zeisel, PhD, has spearheaded a movement to treat Alzheimer's non-pharmacologically by focusing on the mind's strengths. I'm Still Here is a guidebook to Dr. Zeisel's treatment ideas, showing the possibility and benefits of connecting with an Alzheimer's patient through their abilities that don't diminish with time, such as understanding music, art, facial expressions, and touch.

The nation's top "Obamacare" insurance agent, Robert Welk, has authored Maximizing Obamacare to help you finally understand exactly what you need to do to avoid the vast majority of problems people experienced during open enrollment. The need for this audiobook is underscored by a recent revelation from the federal government that almost one-fourth of those enrolled have incorrectly reported their income.

Where does one go without health insurance, when turned away by hospitals, clinics, and doctors? In The People’s Hospital, physician Ricardo Nuila’s stunning debut, we follow the lives of five uninsured Houstonians as their struggle for survival leads them to a hospital where insurance comes second to genuine care.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.

In Unhealthy: Corruption and Malpractice in the American Health System, Dr. Richard Kradin, a professor at Harvard Medical School and expert in pulmonary infectious diseases, explores the history of the corporate and ideological transformation of America’s medical profession and how it has diminished the quality of health care. He describes how progressive medical education has produced a generation of physicians as concerned with political activism as they are with medical science.

Since FDR, the US healthcare system has been mired in politics and policy. All the while it has only increased in complexity and cost. Today half of all personal bankruptcies are attributable to healthcare costs. Many community hospitals are barely getting by with single digit profit margins. With a system teetering on the edge of a systemic crisis, we need to turn to a brand-new approach to rescue the US healthcare system.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.