Health Care Gone Wrong

Why does the world's most expensive health care yield only middling scores and outcomes? Physician/Writer, Philip Hirsh assembles his professional experience and personal stories to trace the decline of medical care from the late 1950s to the present. Starting with medical training and practice from the pre-1970s corporatization of medical care, he recounts how a proud profession gradually lost out to a profit-driven business model abetted by increasing dominance from insurance companies, convoluted laws, and regulations concocted by lobbyists and politicians who protected sponsors at the expense of consumers. The result is an incoherent health care "system" that serves some very well, many fairly well, and the rest hardly at all. Medical technology has advanced, but access and affordability have lost pace with the profits being made. With brevity, clarity, and lack of awe, Hirsh describes how we deserve better, a process that starts with a clear-headed understanding of what has happened in health care history. From there, facts and data, not greed or ideology, can drive the debate.