Articulate, loaded with informative details, especially timely, and bound to leave the reader reaching for a bottle of...
A book examines all aspects of medical care in the United States and how it has changed over the past 60 years.
Geyman (The Human Face of ObamaCare, 2016, etc.) graduated from medical school in 1956. During the subsequent 60 years, he has garnered experience as a rural family physician, a teacher and administrator in three medical schools, and an editor of family medicine journals. He has watched as corporate health behemoths have swallowed up family practice, the traditional bedrock of the relationship between physician and patient: “Family medicine, as the direct descendent of general practice, taking care of patients regardless of age, comprises less than 10 percent of the country’s physician workforce.” The service ethic of medicine, Geyman declares, has been replaced with the “business ethic,” and the result is poorer patient care. Another serious problem he addresses is the skyrocketing cost of health care. High insurance deductibles, extraordinarily escalating pharmaceutical prices, and a tendency on the part of physicians to order excessive tests and procedures to increase compensation have put basic medical care out of reach for millions of Americans. Geyman cites several breathtaking examples regarding prescription costs: the drug Hetlioz, used to treat sleep disorders, costs $148,000 per year. And “hospitals and pharmacies found the prices they had to pay for a bottle of 500 tablets of Doxycycline, a decades-old antibiotic, rose in just six months in 2014 from $20 to $1,849!” This accessible, comprehensive book makes a strong case for a complete overhaul of the U.S. health care system. No fan of the Affordable Care Act, which he says has failed to reduce costs and is a boondoggle for corporate interests, Geyman concludes that the only viable alternative is a single-payer system: “Today’s health care system, serving its corporate masters more than patients, is unfair, ineffective, inhumane for those left out, and financially unsustainable.” The dense volume is occasionally repetitive but lightened a bit by the inclusion of vignettes from the author’s personal practice. Patient anecdotes and commentaries from copious professional sources are compelling.
Articulate, loaded with informative details, especially timely, and bound to leave the reader reaching for a bottle of aspirin.Pub Date: March 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-938218-15-6
Page Count: 358
Publisher: BCH Fulfillment and Distribution
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing but diffuse narrative by an American reporter questing to penetrate the rainforest world of Brazil's nomadic gold miners, or garimpeiros. Tierney (The Highest Altar, 1989) specializes in South American wildness; here, his reporting backs up his proposition that the fevered, clandestine Amazon gold rush—far more anarchic than 19th-century rush in the American West—resembles ``the original sixteenth-century El Dorado quests of self-made conquistadors.'' With descriptive verve, he captures some arresting details—in the gold rush capital of Baiano Formiga, everything is priced in grams of gold—and meets numerous picaresque characters, like a boom-and-bust pilot who flies him into the jungle. Tierney sets some good scenes at the outset, as when, posing as a Chilean miner, he makes it to a village of Yanomamo Indians, where his yoga exercises get him tagged as a shaman; later, a search for his lost possessions involves him with the highly dubious Brazilian cops. But Tierney doesn't do enough to explain who he is and what he seeks as a writer and adventurer. So the book, despite more good stories and anthropological observations, becomes a travelogue without momentum. Tierney describes the malevolent atmosphere of a mining camp, meets a Yanomamo shaman-in-training, and accompanies a Brazilian air force operation that bombs miners' airstrips to stop the mining. He gets malaria and rests for a year, then follows the miners' destabilizing penetration into Venezuela. He helps the Macuxi Indians gather information to battle the garimpeiro invasion of the Brazilian state of Roraima. Although he concludes that the Brazilian government is right to force miners to comply with environmental laws and respect the Indian cultures, Tierney recognizes the romance and attraction of the gold rush—and that the work for many garimpeiros is better than ``urban wage slavery as it currently exists in Brazil.'' Entertaining, but it could've added up to more.
Pub Date: April 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-83372-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
This elementary guide to economics for the layperson maintains an insistently jokey style that strains to amuse but more often just lards the text with annoying verbiage. Buchholz, a member of the White House Economic Policy Council from 1989 to 1993 and now president of a consulting firm, sets out to provide an introduction to key economic concepts and thinkers. Starting with familiar subjects (the 1990 recession, inflation, government deficits, fiscal and monetary policy), he discusses the mechanisms of the free market. He then looks at some topical issues—education, environmental regulation, and health care—from an economist's viewpoint. International trade, foreign investment, and currency exchange are also covered, with a strong free-trade bias. Buchholz provides sensible but simplistic advice on personal investing and concludes with a brief history of economic thought from Adam Smith to contemporary supply-side economics. Scattered throughout are glib or unsupported statements such as: ``The Soviet Union collapsed because its rusty vicious system could not keep up with expectations for economic improvement.'' And unqualified conclusions abound: ``Smart governments know that by allowing trade, nations gently coerce their citizens to shift precious resources from low-productivity to high-productivity industries.'' Whatever useful information Buchholz does provide is smothered in deadening humor. He cannot even keep himself from calling economics the ``dismal science,'' going so far as to devote a passage to the question of whether Adam Smith himself was ``dismal.'' (Smith seems to have redeemed his humanity in Buchholz's eyes by tripping into a ``huge nauseous pool of goop'' while visiting a factory.) Like an irritating traveling companion distracting one from the scenery, this tries too hard to entertain while en route.
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-525-93902-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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