A solid account of a battle between government and industry.
The story of a lawsuit that highlighted bureaucratic errors in the health care field.
In his debut nonfiction book, Giovanis recounts his multiyear quest to get the federal government to correct a calculation issue involving hospital reimbursement rates that ended in a multimillion-dollar settlement in favor of the hospitals. The author, a hospital administrator–turned-consultant, opens the book with an overview of his personal history, then moves on to the central issue: He discovered an error in the formula being used to determine the amount of Medicare payments to hospitals, and when he notified Medicare administrators about the problem, they quietly updated the formula but refused to discuss making good on past miscalculations. Giovanis and his colleagues filed suit against the federal government and recruited hospitals to join the action, hoping to gather more than 100 plaintiffs; they ended up with more than 700 hospitals signing on, with Giovanis as the leader and decision-maker. As the lawsuit proceeded, the author’s wife, Jayne, was dying of cancer; this book is both a tribute to her and a celebration of a wrong righted. The author does a good job of highlighting the key elements of a complex, obscure topic with significant financial implications, providing calculation details for readers who may be interested but effectively aiming the majority of the text at a general audience. Although Giovanis is the hero of the narrative, he acknowledges the contributions of his colleagues; as a result, this is the story of a team effort rather than an individual crusade. The lawsuit’s outcome is evident from the book’s subtitle, but the author still manages to maintain tension throughout as he describes the many challenges and setbacks that the plaintiffs encountered. The book also offers some intriguing big-picture insights into the roles of career bureaucrats, the for-profit companies that make money from government programs, and the relationship between them. Overall, it’s a well-written story on a niche topic for an audience of nonspecialists and a compelling look at modern governance.
A solid account of a battle between government and industry.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-543511-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
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
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
