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
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
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
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