Informed and humane. Some presidential candidate would be smart to sign this gentleman up as a healthcare adviser.
Through the use of a simple quadrant device, Fogoros gives consumers an understanding of how various healthcare systems work, and their multifarious–not to mention nefarious–implications.
Draw a cross: The horizontal axis represents who makes healthcare decisions, with individuals to the right and a centralized authority to the left. The vertical axis measures the quality of those decisions: high at the top and low at the bottom. Onto this four-quadrant model, Fogoros can plot the healthcare universe. For many years we lived in the lower right, the realm of entitlement and no limits and simply not sustainable. As HMOs entered the scene, we shifted to the lower left, which Fogoros describes in withering, and all-too-familiar, detail: The realm in which the doctor-patient relationship went to die and covert rationing unleashed its many ills through the Wonko bureaucrats and Gekko greedheads. The upper right, where the patient makes individualized decisions for the best care, is the province, these days, of the superrich. The upper left, with some form of institutional oversight seeking the wisest healthcare decisions raises a necessity anathema to the American sense of autonomy: rationing. The "option is to give up either our notion that healthcare is an essential entitlement or our conviction that there can be no limits on healthcare." Fogoros proceeds–with gin-clear specifics, propped by ample research, and with an abiding sense of decency–to straddle the top two quadrants (hedging to the left). The rub is rationing. Centralized authorities control a pool of money; while the pool is limited, there are potentially no limits on what can be spent on healthcare. Besides calling for universal healthcare, incentives for doing science, patient participation and returning the doctor-patient relationship, he makes brave forays into the ethics of end-of-life decisions and rationing that seeks to balance fairness with the common good. Not every reader will be sanguine with the mathematics of "quality-adjusted life-year," but at least it’s a stab at a sane measure.
Informed and humane. Some presidential candidate would be smart to sign this gentleman up as a healthcare adviser.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-9796979-0-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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