Review - 'An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back' by Elisabeth Rosenthal

An American Sickness is the most eye-opening book I've read so far this year. It takes the reader through how insurance, hospitals, doctors, big pharma, and medical device manufactures, among others, all prey on the system and the patients to wring every possible cent of profit from American healthcare. Though it is the ill and the poor who suffer immediately from this, really every person who pays taxes is subsidizing this greed in the end.

The book is divided into two parts. The first part, which covers the first two-thirds of the book, takes a detailed look at all that is going wrong with the American healthcare system. The second part contains suggestions for what people can do to push back and combat these wrongs. For such a dry topic, this book was surprisingly easy to read and digest, partly due to the copious amount of real-life examples.

A word of warning though: the greed detailed in this book is often hard to read and swallow. For example, medical devices are not subjected to the same rigorous FDA regulations that drugs are, so patients are the ones who suffer when devices implanted into their bodies fail because they haven't gone through adequate testing. Another example is that doctors can employ extenders, so that if you are in surgery, you can be billed at full price by both the overseeing doctor as well as his assistant. Another example shows drug companies exuberantly raising prices year after year, and paying off other drug companies to not manufacture a generic so that they can retain their monopoly.

My one complaint about this book is that it didn't go far enough in talking about how we can fix the system. Every other developed country in the world is better off in terms of healthcare than we are. I want to know more about how they are able to achieve that, but the book only touched upon some of those points instead of providing a more thorough juxtaposition of how their system works versus ours.

There is so much wrong with the American healthcare system that I'm not sure we can ever as a country pull ourselves out of the mess that we've landed in. The entire system is fundamentally broken. At times, reading this book made me feel sick. I can't believe we've come so far from patient-first healthcare to a world now where profit is king. The currently profit-driven healthcare isn't sustainable, and the country is already buckling under its tremendous cost. Though this book doesn't provide all the answers, it does help me better understand what is happening to healthcare in the U.S., and what I can do as an individual in a vast system.

Readaroo Rating: 4 stars