Critical Condition: How Health Care In America Became Big Business-And Bad Medicine:

Authors: Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele

ISBN: 038550453

The following review was contributed: NORMA Goldman Editor of Bookpleasures:

REVIEW

Investigative reporters and journalists in history only to be awarded two Pulitzer Prize and two National Magazine Awards, Donald L. Bartlett and James B. Steele have presented a riveting examples of objects in a critical condition in the health care system in the U.S. States with his book critical condition: How health care in America became Big business and Bad medicine

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Starting with the assertion that the American health care is transferred from one of sympathy for the system motivated by profit to present a disturbing analysis of what went wrong. Where forty-four million people without health insurance, and tens of millions more are underinsured. However, it seems that this enduring myth propagated by many that the U.S. has a "world-class health system."

As mentioned by the authors, the United States spends more on health care than any other nation, when you compare it to Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada. However, in these countries citizens do not think twice about seeking help if they are sick. Do not worry about who will pay the full accounts.

In the U.S., it has become a lottery. If you are lucky to be employed in a large company providing generous health benefits, you win. On the other hand, if you're self-employed or work for small businesses that provides little or no coverage, you lose. You May even go bankrupt and lose their home to pay medical bills.

Relying on interviews, studies from various organizations like the World Health Organization, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, legal suits, brokerage reports, congressional hearings, newspaper articles, magazine stories, SEC filings, professional journals, many aresevoir other sources (all of which are mentioned in the Notes section at the end of the book), the authors deliver legitimate arguments illustrating how an assortment of factors had crept into the system with the ominous effects.

broken down into six chapters, Bartlett and Steele judiciously examine some of these elements, such as excessively angry patients who do not have insurance, dissuading people from buying drugs from Canada, with incorrect information about the Canadian pharmaceutical industry, caving into the special requirements stakeholders, lack of independent monitoring of diagnostic test results and hospital mistakes, permitting politicians and business people to assume key roles at the expense of citizens' welfare, culture cronyism that led to the obvious fraud in many cases, physicians must cope with the conditions easy to find in developing countries, peopled shuffled around individuals who do not have the foggiest idea of ​​how to deal with them.

In addition, we are informed of how private companies in connection with Wall Street financiers and Madison Avenue advertising firms are allowed to join as the health care is analogous to selling cars or MacDonald's franchises. As the authors rightly ask: "Is this what health care in America became the"

Although the authors show a certain amount of cynicism, there is a glimmer of hope, as confirmed by the concluding chapter, which offered suggestions on how to renew the maintenance of the system.

However, the question lingers on. Americans will re-examine their values​​, priorities, budgets and the options and choose the people who will be primarily concerned about its citizens when it comes to health care? Something most civilized nations do.