An American sickness
by Elisabeth Rosenthal · first published 2017
73% recommend27% neutral
Why HN recommends it
Explains how US healthcare pricing and incentives work, covering the many players and their conflicting interests, with historical context. Recommended for anyone wanting to understand why it costs so much.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
"An award-winning New York Times reporter Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal reveals the dangerous, expensive, and dysfunctional American healthcare system, and tells us exactly what we can do to solve its myriad of problems. It is well documented that our healthcare system has grave problems, but how, in only a matter of decades, did things get this bad? Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms; she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. Rosenthal spells out in clear and practical terms exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and ge
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…of money though. I am not sure how much of this is specific to the internal US market vs. carries over to US exports. For a good treatment of this and many other aspects of US healthcare costs, see An American Sickness by Elisabeth Rosenthal.
on “How a shampoo bottle is saving young lives” ↗I just finished "An American Sickness" (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1594206759) that does a good job of targeting all the specific points of inefficiency, with a little bit of explanatory history and exemplary anecdote sprinkled in.
on “America’s Health-Care Crisis Is a Gold Mine for Crowdfunding” ↗Related: If you want to understand how and why the American Healthcare system is broken, read the excellent book An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal.
on “An anarchist takes on Big Pharma by teaching patients to make their own meds” ↗Elisabeth Rosenthal's "An American Sickness" is one of the best overviews of the many aspects and incentives for pricing in healthcare. https://www.anamericansickness.com/
on “What I learned from reading a thousand emergency room bills” ↗For those interested... I thought this was a pretty good book going over the creation and evolution of the US Healthcare system. It's equal parts fascinating and infuriating. An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back by Elisabeth Rosenthal ASIN : 1594206759 Publisher : Penguin Press; 1st edition (April 11, 2017) Language : English Hardcover : 416 pages ISBN-10…
on “The Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company” ↗Good points in here. If you want to read a good book that discusses all the different players in healthcare, i recommend “An American Sickness” by Elisabeth Rosenthal. It does a great job pointing out the various players and the conflicting interests between them. Highly recommend for anyone looking to learn more.
on “Google is dismantling its health division” ↗> [you] are essentially making a hand-waving argument I'm not the only one. "In Elisabeth Rosenthal’s excellent book, An American Sickness, she notes: 'The median cost to a hospital for each full-time resident in 2013 was $134,803. That includes a salary of between $50,000 and $80,000. Federal support translates into about $100,000 per…
on “It's just a virus, the E.R. told him – days later, he was dead” ↗…indeed incentivize insurance carriers to tolerate higher healthcare bills. This affects PPOs much worse than HMOs. It should all be burnt down. Further reading, one of the best books on the subject: "An American Sickness"
on “What happened with HMOs? An update and an empirical research question” ↗If you want to read more on this topic, I highly recommend An American Sickness (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31253737-an-american-sic...). It's written by the current Editor in Chief of Kaiser Health News.
on “The US spends more on healthcare for no gain says new report from Johns Hopkins” ↗…surprise that healthcare industry has by far the biggest lobbying spend in the US - nearly double that of Oil & Gas (https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/top.php?indexType=i&showYe...). ------ The book American Sickness(https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01IOHQ9LO/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...) discusses just how far we are from any type of perfect competition in this industry and the resulting effects on consumers. I really enjoyed…
on “Insulin Wars: How insurance companies farm out dirty work to doctors patients” ↗Highly recommend the book, "An American Sickness," for reading about tactics like the one described in the article that Big Pharma and other players (e.g. insurers) in the healthcare ecosystem use to extract money out of said ecosystem.
on “Big Pharma is using faux generics to keep drug prices high, critics say” ↗This project reminds me of a book I highly recommend called An American Sickness. It sheds a lot of light on the same sorts of issues. One underlying, perverse incentive behind many of the problems is that insurers are regulated based on percentages of spending rather than total…
on “US commercial insurers pay 254% of Medicare for the same hospital procedures” ↗Read the book “An American Sickness”. It is indeed everyone.
on “Who profits most from America's baffling health-care system?” ↗…good work, sometimes the medical-industrial complex makes work for itself. When insurance is paying the bills, no one has to care about effectiveness or costs. Elisabeth Rosenthal recently published An American Sickness. These lines from Insurance policy: How an industry shifted from protecting patients to seeking profit [0] concisely summarize the medical industry's current business model: >> The very idea of health…
on “Opaque and sky high bills are breaking Americans, and our health care system” ↗> I don't think any of the people involved in the science here want to be doing paliative solutions, but rather it's the best they can get funding for. Elisabeth Rosenthal wrote An American Sickness about this phenomenon. This essay is a good preview: How Economic Incentives have Created our Dysfunctional US Medical Market - https://medium.com/@RosenthalHealth/how-economic-incentives-...
on “Vaccines against addictive drugs push forward despite past failures” ↗