A Colorado ophthalmologist lasers gaping holes in Medicare, Medicaid and Obamacare, prescribes a new two-tiered health care system and Dutch-uncles ridiculously overinsured Americans.
The book’s title doesn’t quite work, but everything else in first-time author Beyer’s sharp-eyed look at health care in the United States is revealing to a fault, and, as a reader might expect, it’s not a pretty picture. Medicare and Medicaid are Ponzi schemes and deficit makers that augur higher taxes. Obamacare, while well-intentioned, is a poison pill that will drive private doctors out of business as its myriad regulations diminish the overall quality of health care. With lobbyists running interference, Big Pharma and insurers are running riot gaming the system, with some doctors joining in. Meanwhile, government officials and these same insurers, clueless about what doctors face, are making the rules and setting fees. Honest, everyday physicians who are doing no better than plumbers and their hapless patients stand at the very bottom of a trickle-down, gazillion dollar, third-party-payer health system that is dysfunctional in every way. This may sound familiar, but what sets Beyer’s rendition apart is the cogent, lucid manner in which he indignantly makes his case. Though he occasionally sounds like a screamer at the back of the hall, what really shows through is a rugged individualist, old-line Western conservative with naturopathic leanings. Get off your dern butts, he says, and learn to eat and live right. He advises reserving the government safety net for the relative few who are truly sick, disabled or mentally incapacitated. For the rest, tax-exempt personal health savings accounts can fund medical care while giving incentives not to overconsume. This system cuts out third parties and leaves it up to patients and their physicians to set fees in free market style. Throw in a modicum of high-deductible, catastrophic insurance and most people will have all the protection they need, plus health costs will plummet. The plan looks good on paper, but how will it take effect? Which presidential candidate will heed the call? Or is this just a somewhat Colorado-centric eye doc crying in the wilderness. A highly illuminating book that deserves the widest possible audience, not that it would necessarily make any difference.
Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463745998
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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