Sick The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---And the People Who Pay the Price |
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Author:
| Cohn, Jonathan |
ISBN: | 978-0-06-058045-2 |
Publication Date: | Apr 2007 |
Publisher: | HarperCollins Publishers
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Imprint: | Harper |
Book Format: | Hardback |
List Price: | USD $25.95USD $25.95 |
Book Description:
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America's health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families--unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States--the only...
More Description
America's health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families--unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States--the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship--to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans.
The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating. In Boston, a heart attack victim becomes a casualty of emergency room overcrowding when she is turned away from the one hospital that could treat her. In South Central L.A., a security guard loses part of his vision when he can't find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the middle of the prairie heartland, a retired meatpacker sells his house to pay for the medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. And, in a tiny village tucked into the Catskill mountains, a mother of three young children decides against a costly doctor's visit--and lets a deadly cancer go undetected--because her husband's high-tech job no longer provides health insurance.
Passionate, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick interweaves these stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington and takes us inside the medical industry to chronicle the decline of America's health care system--and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.