An engaging read that paints an honest picture of how a broken system impacts patients and providers.
A reflective doctor uses moving stories to reveal huge gaps and potential fixes in the deeply flawed American health care system.
Yurkiewicz’s poignant prose reads like a novel, knitting patient and personal stories with an honest insider’s evaluation of a highly problematic system. The author, a physician on the faculty of Stanford Medicine, writes from her experiences as a resident, fellow, oncologist, and caregiver. As she states, the system is designed for reaction and “shifts blame onto individuals instead of focusing on sustainable systemic changes,” leaving patients and their families at serious risk. Yurkiewicz describes three major issues with the American health care system and presents the potential solutions. In the first part, “The Data Dig,” the author tackles the massive difficulties she encounters with electronic medical records. When a patient has a complex history, attempting to treat them is “like opening a book to page 200 and being asked to write page 201.” In the second section of the book, “Lost to Follow-Up,” Yurkiewicz calls for a more preventative-focused system. She uses multiple patient stories to explain the critical, yet common, problem of fielding a full team of doctors and illuminates the many issues involved with the pernicious 28-hour shift, “a rite of passage for doctors.” In “The Stories We Tell Ourselves,” the author criticizes many enduring myths about the U.S. health care system, and in the chapter titled “These Things Happen,” she examines her subject through the lens of her caregiving role for her ill father. “I started to see my dad’s hospitalization as an endless series of branch points: each of them could make or break the recovery of a critically ill person…His medical care was a game of risk.” Though Yurkiewicz may not fully solve the health care game, she provides plenty of food for thought for caregivers and medical professionals.
An engaging read that paints an honest picture of how a broken system impacts patients and providers.Pub Date: July 11, 2023
ISBN: 9780393881196
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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