A strongly argued account that provides useful ammunition for anyone seeking to effect change in a medical system that...
Every one of the Western industrialized powers guarantees its citizens comprehensive coverage for essential health care—except the United States. Sociologist Quadagno (The Color of Welfare, 1994) ably explores the logic behind this appalling fact.
It’s a complex question, as Quadagno allows: Amortization and other risk-analysis models mingle with myriad underwriting plans and the plain high cost of medical care to make comprehensive health care a maddeningly elusive goal. And then, of course, the powers that be don’t want it. It is for those reasons, but not those reasons alone, that so many Americans lack basic coverage—and their numbers are larger by far than the official count of 45 million in 2003, “because many more people are uninsured for some period over any two-year time span.” The poor are almost always uninsured, except under the most generalized of plans; in a two-year span, nearly 60 percent of non-elderly Hispanics were also uninsured, as against 43 percent of African-Americans and 23 percent of whites. Part of the problem is that minorities are less likely than whites to have jobs that offer health care benefits. But attempts to include all Americans in a national plan have been stymied for more than a century. Heroes are few and villains many here. When Franklin Roosevelt attempted to include health insurance in the 1935 Social Security Act, the American Medical Association successfully argued that it “smacked of socialism and communism and might incite revolution.” When Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower attempted health care reforms during their administrations, they met much the same opposition, this time with the strong backing of the insurance industry. And, as Quadagno relates, the present administration is indisposed toward any reform that would threaten the status quo, period, even as the average annual cost of a family policy in 2003 rose to $9,068.
A strongly argued account that provides useful ammunition for anyone seeking to effect change in a medical system that willfully excludes so many who so need it.Pub Date: April 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-19-516039-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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