A conversational guide that simplifies complex health care options.
A former health care industry insider offers tips for securing quality care without paying top dollar.
As a consultant, debut author Heiser advised corporations on how to cut their health care costs. In this book, he makes that service available to laypeople who may be perplexed by their health insurance choices. The author notes that, due to confusion and a sense of helplessness, today’s “consumers are…disenfranchised by the healthcare complex.” His aim is to show them how to take their power back and become proactive about their health. The book provides a brief history of third-party health payments, beginning in the 1920s, and a useful rundown of the pros and cons of the Affordable Care Act. Heiser tallies the average lifetime costs of medical treatment for men and women, itemizing health care spending per year (which, combined, works out to be 17.9% of the U.S. gross domestic product), and lays out the expected prices of routine exams and catastrophic illnesses. It’s sobering to see these numbers set out so plainly; a premature birth, for example could set you back $235,245, while the high-end cost of leukemia treatment is $2.3 million. The best way to avoid astronomical medical bills is to avoid getting sick, the author observes; to that end, he discusses the cornerstones of a healthy lifestyle—good diet, adequate exercise, not smoking, and reducing stress. However, he acknowledges that even the healthy and well prepared can fall victim to random illnesses, so it’s essential to have solid coverage. His invaluable comparison of health insurance plans includes clear definitions of jargon, and he also explains hospital markups, medical tourism, and alternative or supplemental insurance plans. He gives advice on how to choose a medical provider, what questions to ask before a procedure, and how to access lower-cost prescription drugs. Along the way, the pace is snappy, with short sentences, charts, bullet points, and rhetorical questions that make all the information easily digestible and never overwhelming. The informal, no-nonsense tone occasionally verges on impolite (“Get my point?”), but ultimately, this makes sense, as Heiser wants the reader to be a wise shopper rather than a “passive participant in the system.”
A conversational guide that simplifies complex health care options.Pub Date: June 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-1197-9
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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