A disturbing, timely report on the deep corruption of health care by capitalism run amok.
Private equity firms are weakening America’s medical industry and hurting patients with their callous drive for profits, according to this sobering exposé.
Lehigh University political science professor Olson, who previously wrote about the industry in The Politics of Medicaid (2010), probes the takeover of much of the health care sector by private equity firms that buy companies with borrowed money and saddle them with enormous debt obligations; the PE owners then service these debts and wring profits out of their new companies by slashing costs, raising prices, and laying off workers, with an eye toward quickly selling the company again (often to another PE firm). Olson patiently unravels the labyrinthine dealmaking by which PE firms have bought hospitals, medical specialty practices, dialysis clinics, rehab centers, nursing homes, hospices, dental offices, and ambulance services, sometimes assembling them into giant health care monopolies. The results, she contends, have been dire. The pressures of debt and profit-seeking incentivize PE managers to cut budgets; shift care from highly trained doctors to lower-skilled, underpaid, and overworked nurses and physician assistants; skimp on supplies; lower standards while also performing unnecessary procedures; engage in upcoding; raise prices; and hound patients who can’t pay the resulting inflated bills. She uncovers many horror stories at PE–run facilities; for example, dermatology practices that misdiagnosed cancer as eczema, inadequately anesthetized kids strapped down for agonizing root canals on their baby teeth, autistic teens beaten and sexually assaulted, epidemics of billing fraud, and car-crash victims who get $60,000 bills for a flight of a few miles in a medevac chopper. Olson draws on press reports, regulatory filings, and her own interviews with health care workers to flesh out a detailed and troubling picture of private equity depredations. Her research is far-ranging and meticulous; she names names, crunches the numbers, and shows her receipts, conveying her findings in lucid prose lit with flashes of passion. Hers is a finely honed critique not just of malpractice and financial hubris, but of a dispiriting moral shabbiness that’s poisoned a field that should be idealistic and humane. Many readers will feel similarly outraged at the avarice she unearths here.
A disturbing, timely report on the deep corruption of health care by capitalism run amok.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4214-4285-3
Page Count: 440
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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