A comprehensive handbook covering the operations of a niche industry.
A manual for entrepreneurs interested in opening a medical transportation business.
In this debut business book, Possi draws on his own experiences as the founder and owner of a nonemergency medical transport company to provide guidance to others entering the field. The book covers everything from basic principles of small business, such as financing and personnel management, to the multitude of federal, state, and local regulations that specifically affect businesses in the health care industry. Possi is clearly knowledgeable, and provides detailed, useful information on such topics as selecting and equipping an ambulette, the crucial role played by the dispatcher, and the workings of the Medicaid bureaucracy. Later chapters offer insights into a typical day in his business, with Possi’s remarks supported by contributions from several of his key employees. The book concludes with a series of appendices with contact information for state Medicaid administrators, lists of vendors that provide specialized equipment for medical transport vehicles, and related resources. The author’s knowledge of the industry makes this book an effective tool. However, there are moments when the narrative seems overly shaped by his personal experience; in particular, Possi’s preference for policies, handbooks, and a command-and-control approach to management seems connected to his frequent stories about employees’ misuse of corporate credit cards, irresponsible cellphone use, and inefficient driving. Readers who prefer to avoid micromanagement may also want to pass over the discussions of how to handle personnel. There are many references to topics to be covered in a subsequent book, and frequent invitations to visit Possi’s website, where readers can purchase logistics software and other tools, which some readers may find too self-promotional. But on the whole, the work is a valuable contribution to an underserved topic, filled with information found in few other books. As a result, it’s crucial for readers exploring a career in this unfamiliar field.
A comprehensive handbook covering the operations of a niche industry.Pub Date: May 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-6711-5
Page Count: 154
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
American schools at every level, from kindergarten to postgraduate programs, have substituted ideological indoctrination for education, charges conservative think-tanker Sowell (Senior Fellow/Hoover Institution; Preferential Polices, 1990, etc.) in this aggressive attack on the contemporary educational establishment. Sowell's quarrel with "values clarification" programs (like sex education, death-sensitizing, and antiwar "brainwashing") isn't that he disagrees with their positions but, rather, that they divert time and resources from the kind of training in intellectual analysis that makes students capable of reasoning for themselves. Contending that the values clarification programs inspired by his archvillain, psychotherapist Carl Rogers, actually inculcate values confusion, Sowell argues that the universal demand for relevance and sensitivity to the whole student has led public schools to abdicate their responsibility to such educational ideals as experience and maturity. On the subject of higher education, Sowell moves to more familiar ground, ascribing the declining quality of classroom instruction to the insatiable appetite of tangentially related research budgets and bloated athletic programs (to which an entire chapter, largely irrelevant to the book's broader argument, is devoted). The evidence offered for these propositions isn't likely to change many minds, since it's so inveterately anecdotal (for example, a call for more stringent curriculum requirements is bolstered by the news that Brooke Shields graduated from Princeton without taking any courses in economics, math, biology, chemistry, history, sociology, or government) and injudiciously applied (Sowell's dismissal of student evaluations as responsible data in judging a professor's classroom performance immediately follows his use of comments from student evaluations to document the general inadequacy of college teaching). All in all, the details of Sowell's indictment—that not only can't Johnny think, but "Johnny doesn't know what thinking is"—are more entertaining than persuasive or new.
Pub Date: Jan. 4, 1993
ISBN: 0-02-930330-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
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