By Steven Brill
America's sour Pill is Steven Brill's much-anticipated, sweeping narrative of the way the reasonable Care Act, or Obamacare, was once written, the way it is being carried out, and, most vital, the way it is changing--and failing to change--the rampant abuses within the healthcare undefined. Brill probed the depths of our nation's healthcare problem in his trailblazing Time journal unique record, which gained the 2014 nationwide journal Award for Public curiosity. Now he broadens his lens and delves deeper, pulling no punches and taking no prisoners.
It's a fly-on-the-wall account of the struggle, amid an onslaught of lobbying, to move a 961-page legislations geared toward solving America's biggest, such a lot dysfunctional industry--an greater than the total economic system of France.
It's a penetrating chronicle of ways the profiteering that Brill first pointed out in his Time conceal tale maintains, regardless of Obamacare.
And it's the first entire, inside of account of the way President Obama continued to push throughout the legislation, yet then did not care for the workers incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation.
Brill questions all of the members within the drama, together with the president, to determine what occurred and why.
He asks the pinnacle of the business enterprise answerable for the Obamacare web site how and why it crashed.
And he tells the cliffhanger tale of the tech wizards who swooped in to rebuild it.
Brill will get drug lobbyists to open up at the bargains they struck to guard their gains in go back for helping the law.
And he buttresses some of these money owed with meticulous examine and entry to inner memos, emails, notes, and journals written by way of the major gamers in the course of the entire pivotal moments.
Brill is there with sufferers once they are denied melanoma care at a sanatorium, or charged $77 for a field of gauze pads. Then he asks the multimillion-dollar executives who run the hospitals to give an explanation for why.
He even confronts the manager govt of America's greatest medical health insurance corporation and asks him to provide an explanation for an incomprehensible clarification of advantages his corporation despatched to Brill.
And he's there as a bunch of younger marketers gamble hundreds of thousands to exploit Obamacare to begin a hip coverage corporation in New York's Silicon Alley.
Vividly shooting what he calls the "milestone" fulfillment of Obamacare, Brill introduces us to sufferers whose financial institution bills or lives were stored by means of the hot law--although, as he explains, that's simply simply because Obamacare presents executive subsidies for "tens of hundreds of thousands of recent customers" to pay an analogous exorbitant costs that have been the matter within the first position.
All that's weaved jointly in an elegantly crafted, fast moving narrative.
yet accidentally America's sour Pill finally ends up being a lot more--because as Brill was once finishing this publication, he needed to endure pressing open-heart surgical procedure.
hence, this additionally turns into the tale of the way one sufferer who thinks he is familiar with every little thing approximately healthcare "policy" rethinks it from a clinic gurney--and combines that perception together with his magnificent reporting. the end result: a stunning new imaginative and prescient of the way we will repair American healthcare in order that it stops draining the financial institution bills of our households and our companies, and the federal treasury.
Read or Download America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System PDF
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Additional resources for America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
Sample text
We can understand the nature of the ideal because we have a real though imperfect knowledge of it through personal love, art, and reli gion. If we view these kinds of experiences without regard to their place in society, they seem to show us the manner in which it is possible for the conflicting modes of the self to be brought into harmony with one another and the antinomies of liberal thought overcome. Nevertheless, they represent the good in a merely abstract way, a way separated from everyday life and set up in opposition to it.
It con sists of the understanding of relationships among entities that exist out side the world of facts. Such entities are called ideas. ( The same name, however, is also given to combinations of sensations by the mind machine. ) 9 The mind is in a peculiar predicament. It knows things as they appear to it through sensation rather than as they really are. Perfect certainty, therefore, can only be achieved in the study of those things we may know without sensation, like the truths of logic and mathematics.
That is why the doctrine of organic groups remains indeterminate. From its prin ciples different conclusions may be derived for settings of choice, and among those conclusions theory by itself is powerless to arbitrate. At the core of the imperfections of politics and of know ledge lie the very problems of the universal and the particular, transcendence and immanence, the self and the world, that are the different aspects of my 24 I KNOWLEDGE AND POLITICS central theme. The meaning of the impossibility of resolving these prob lems within history in a full and final manner is the concluding topic of the essay.