A well-researched, intelligent, and boldly alternative approach to health care reform.
A veteran physician provides a plan to revamp the country’s current state of medical care.
In Paguyo’s (Better Than ObamaCare, 2013) enterprising book, he considers American health care to be advanced and reliable, yet also “expensive, full of faults, wasteful” and “a total failure in providing healthcare for all Americans.” His complex proposal for change drills down to the core of the problems plaguing the system and offers an array of comprehensive solutions. These fixes, he asserts, should restore a sense of balance and accessibility to the country’s health care delivery system. The author maintains that the 2010 Affordable Care Act fails to properly address health care’s major issues and has made it “worse and more expensive.” He outlines (and endorses) a unique prototype with a list of guidelines and principles, such as program simplicity for the average consumer and a governmental medical “superfund” that would pool federal money for disbursement at the state level. The volume also clearly defines the functionality of each initiative as well as depicting how Paguyo’s health care plan would be funded from various government entities and who would oversee the official operation of its financial implementation and management. While it’s obvious the author has carefully analyzed his plan’s development, strategy, and delivery protocol, he is less effective in systematically describing how his revolutionary program would function within the current political and social environments and how his changes would be enacted. While Paguyo’s propositions are certainly daring and provocative, not all of them seem reasonable. His risky proposal for a state-by-state, two-stage bidding process becomes buried beneath an array of cumbersome requirements. In terms of comparative evaluations, the author cleverly presents an overview of already established national health care systems—such as those in Britain, Canada, France, Japan, and Switzerland—and how they’ve fared in effectiveness, durability, and popularity over time. Paguyo also contributes historical data on the vast evolution of U.S. medical care post-World War II. While the author’s ultimate vision is lucid and workable, his solutions become muddied when applied to the current state of health care: a lucrative, serpentine industry influenced by political and economic manipulation, congressional roadblocks, and lopsided patient care standards. Still, the author’s dogged efforts and passion are honorable and represent a physician who is truly motivated to improve how medical care is delivered in America.
A well-researched, intelligent, and boldly alternative approach to health care reform.Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-64045-867-3
Page Count: 206
Publisher: LitFire Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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