Here are 77 books that The Price We Pay fans have personally recommended if you like
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Born and raised in the Chicago area, I worked in the automotive industry as a car salesperson and racing team manager, financial services as a Registered Representative, and a member of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. An expat in Panama since 2004, I worked in business development for several healthcare products and co-founded an air medical transport service. Over the last decade, I’ve represented two businesses delivering protective medical care to high-net-worth individuals where I learned care’s gold standard from former White House physicians. My research included the books I recommend here and inspired me to write the Expat Health Guide for current and future expats.
I found Fixing the Primary Care Crisis as I was researching the root cause of America’s healthcare problems. Dr. Schimpff shares keen, frontline insights into how we arrived at a crisis point. He dials in on time with the patient as a critical factor, and how primary care was devastated over many decades by government and insurance intrusion. That he became a medical mentor is another fortunate outcome from discovering his book. He helped refine my thinking and incorporated it into my book. Fixing the Primary Care Crisisis the first book I recommend for understanding what we have now and solutions for fixing it. I was very proud to have him as my first Winning Healthcare Food Fights podcast guest.
In this deeply researched yet controversial book, Stephen C. Schimpff, MD explains why our healthcare delivery system serves us so poorly and costs so much, and why government and insurer policy has not only failed to improve care delivery but has actually made it worse. Primary care physicians have been forced into a non-sustainable business model that drives them to schedule an unreasonable number of patient visits per day. Too many visits means not enough time per patient, forcing those physicians to instead refer a patient to a specialist, order a test, or write a prescription when more time would…
Born and raised in the Chicago area, I worked in the automotive industry as a car salesperson and racing team manager, financial services as a Registered Representative, and a member of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. An expat in Panama since 2004, I worked in business development for several healthcare products and co-founded an air medical transport service. Over the last decade, I’ve represented two businesses delivering protective medical care to high-net-worth individuals where I learned care’s gold standard from former White House physicians. My research included the books I recommend here and inspired me to write the Expat Health Guide for current and future expats.
In my ongoing research into America’s dysfunctional healthcare system, Dr. Ken Fisher was a name I kept hearing. “Read his book,” said the MDs I trust. The roots of our current mess stretch back over one hundred years. Just after blood-letting was a thing. I didn’t know Otto Von Bismarck offered a nationalized healthcare plan for Germany. Though he failed, Prime Minister Lloyd George introduced the concept to England, and the NHS was born. Ken lays out the dominoes and how they fell into today’s American system. I learned how unleashing Health Savings Accounts enables a better system than the current employer-centered mess. I was thrilled Ken agreed to be a Winning Healthcare Food Fights podcast guest.
Freedom in Health Care, by Kenneth A. Fisher, MD. Feb. 2016, 154 pages plus tables, reading list, and footnotes. (ISBN: 9780997151114) Dr. Fisher provides the reader an in-depth understanding of how we got into this controversial, overly expensive, exceedingly complex and bureaucratic healthcare system and ends with a comprehensive solution delivering the promise of personalized health care for all at far less cost.
This manuscript was written with a historical perspective so that the reader will gain a clear understanding of the misconceptions and accidents of history that have led to our present dysfunctional and contentious system of healthcare. To…
Born and raised in the Chicago area, I worked in the automotive industry as a car salesperson and racing team manager, financial services as a Registered Representative, and a member of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. An expat in Panama since 2004, I worked in business development for several healthcare products and co-founded an air medical transport service. Over the last decade, I’ve represented two businesses delivering protective medical care to high-net-worth individuals where I learned care’s gold standard from former White House physicians. My research included the books I recommend here and inspired me to write the Expat Health Guide for current and future expats.
Ever hear of MLR or Medical Loss Ratio? I had, but it didn’t click why it was a cruel joke on American healthcare consumers until I read Marshall’s book. His give a kid a bowl of ice cream analogy is so spot on that I asked for and received his permission to quote it in my book. My dad used to say that a sure sign of genius is making a complex subject understandable to an eighth grader. Marshall’s a genius. His insights stem from over 15 years of investigative reporting on the healthcare industry are critical to combatting a downright evil billing system. Whenever a friend mentions they’ve been in the hospital, or will be, I tell them to read this book.
From award-winning ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen, a primer for anyone who wants to fight the predatory health care system--and win.
Every year, millions of Americans are overcharged and underserved while the health care industry makes record profits. We know something is wrong, but the layers of bureaucracy designed to discourage complaints make pushing back seem impossible. At least, this is what the health care power players want you to think.
Never Pay the First Bill is the guerilla guide to health care the American people and employers need. Drawing on 15 years of investigating the health care industry, reporter Marshall…
Born and raised in the Chicago area, I worked in the automotive industry as a car salesperson and racing team manager, financial services as a Registered Representative, and a member of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. An expat in Panama since 2004, I worked in business development for several healthcare products and co-founded an air medical transport service. Over the last decade, I’ve represented two businesses delivering protective medical care to high-net-worth individuals where I learned care’s gold standard from former White House physicians. My research included the books I recommend here and inspired me to write the Expat Health Guide for current and future expats.
To say moving to Panama was life-changing is an understatement. Only as an expat would I have met my medical mentor, a former White House physician. His boss was Dr. Mariano, and he recommended her book to give more of the backstory on caring for the world’s most demanding patient. Before Dr. Connie, White House care was almost informal. After President Clinton appointed her, she launched a massive care uplift to the world’s finest executive health program. So many facets of the White House Medical Unit’s procedures and thinking made even more sense when Dr. Robert Darling taught me about the thinking behind President Clinton’s care. Between these two physicians, I learned the correct answer to: How do you know you have outstanding care? (Hint: It’s not insurance.)
Dr. Connie Mariano served 9 years at the White House under Presidents George H.W. Bush, William J. Clinton, and George W. Bush. She participated in world headline-making news events and travelled all over the world. She cared for visiting dignitaries and was charged with caring for all the members of the First Family. From flirting with King Juan Carlos of Spain to spending the night on the Queen of England's yacht, Dr. Mariano glimpsed a glittering and powerful celebrity that few ever see. "White House Doctor" is a fascinating look into what goes on behind closed doors at 1600 Pennsylvania…
I am the former president of Pfizer Global Research, where I led research groups around the globe in finding new medicines to treat cancer, addiction, AIDS, immunological diseases, and pain. After retiring from Pfizer, I have been closely involved with biotech companies that also are seeking breakthrough drugs. This industry is a crucial part of the healthcare ecosystem, as evidenced by the remarkable response and, ultimately, the crushing of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, it is not just underappreciated but is treated with scorn by many. This booklist provides sources from which the reader can gain a full understanding of the value of the biopharmaceutical industry, the challenges it faces, and its importance to the world’s health.
Legislators and healthcare insurers are seeking ways to slash healthcare costs, often focusing on cutting the costs of medicines through schemes like price controls. Yet, drugs make up only about 13 percent of the money paid on healthcare. This book does a great job of explaining what is behind the pricing of new drugs but, more importantly, shows that all life-saving drugs eventually become low-cost generics – truly a Great American Drug Deal.
This book scrutinizes all players in the healthcare industry and offers new ideas for cost-saving measures, such as closing loopholes, dealing with bad actors, and educating consumers. If you want to understand how best to balance innovation and affordability, this book is a must-read.
Developing life-changing drugs is risky and expensive—but that’s not what makes them unaffordable.Drug pricing is a staple of every news cycle and political debate. And while we’ve struggled for decades to agree on solutions that serve all patients without jeopardizing the invention of new medicines, many Americans suffer because they can’t afford the drugs they need.Do we really have to choose between affordability and innovation?In The Great American Drug Deal, scientist and industry expert Peter Kolchinsky answers this question with a decisive No. The pharmaceutical industry’s commitment to creating new lifesaving drugs destined to become inexpensive generics can be balanced…
I'm an author of books for young readers. These days, there’s nothing more important than having conversations about the Coronavirus disease. It can be hard for grown-ups to start a conversation about Covid with their kids. But they can read a book about the subject and invite the kids to respond to what they heard and saw. My book COVID-19 Helpers was the first place winner of the Emery Global Health Institute’s e-book contest back in May 2020. Through the pandemic, I’ve been reading and talking about the virus with kids from around the world. If you're interested in having me read one of my books to your school, clinic, or your daycare center feel free to get in touch.
This picture book biography does so many things at once—and does it all with a masterful, lyrical storytelling voice. Of course, the primary thing this book does is tell the story of a real person’s life: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In this story, we learn about his ordinary childhood, his personal interests, and the ways his family inspired and encouraged him. It shows that even people we see on the news were once children, just like the kids reading this book. More than that, this book is a celebration of science and the excitement of scientific discoveries.
It reminds kids (and grown-ups) that science is a creative endeavour. So once the urgency of learning about the COVID virus wanes, this book will be still valuable as a primer on how scientists do their work. Additionally, though the narrative part of…
The definitive picture book biography of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and one of the most crucial figures in the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before he was Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Anthony Fauci was a curious boy in Brooklyn, delivering prescriptions from his father's pharmacy on his blue Schwinn bicycle. His father and immigrant grandfather taught Anthony to ask questions, consider all the data, and never give up-and Anthony's ability to stay curious and to communicate with people would serve him his entire life.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left…
My mother wanted me to be a physician, but as a child I was very squeamish about human biology and knew that wasn't for me. In college I was exposed to economics and found it, and the policy debates about national health insurance, fascinating. So, maybe with my mother’s wishes in the back of my mind, I became a health economist. I was privileged to direct a large randomized trial called the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which varied the cost of medical care to families. This project lasted more than a decade and got me so deep into the economics of health and medical care that I became a professor of health policy and management.
Almost all Americans think the high cost of health care is a major problem and a large number think access to services is also a problem.
Many, however, think that if a person has access to medical care and good insurance, quality of care is excellent. That’s sometimes true, but often not as this book describes.
In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country's medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In The Quality Cure, renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the future of health care reform--one that shows how information technology, realigned payment systems, and value-focused organizations together have the…
In my younger days, as the son of a medical professor and a public health nurse, I was more interested in healing society than patients. But my political interests and research agenda as a professor of political science ultimately led back to medicine. I found that profit-maximizing market competition in health care failed miserably to promote value in therapeutics and economize on society’s scarce resources. I became aware of the neglect of public health to prevent disease for vulnerable groups in society and save money as well as lives. Pervasive and enduring economic conflicts of interest in the medical-industrial complex bear primary responsibility for severe deficits in quality, equality, and economy in American health care.
If you think that medical journals published by respected medical societies are full of good science, think again.
For me, Abramson’s Sickeningnailed the case for a conclusion that the net effect of the many hundreds of medical journals published here and around the world is to subtract from the sum of human medical knowledge.
Abramson, as an expert witness in criminal and civil cases against drug companies, draws in part on subpoenaed documents to expose how medical science, as part of the entire medical-industrial complex, is corrupted from start to finish by the drug industry’s funding of most clinical trials, their control over the data analysis, and even their ghost-writing of articles submitted to journals.
New and disturbing was the withholding of clinical trials’ raw data from journals’ peer reviewers. Instead, they get biased summaries bearing drug manufacturers’ fingerprints.
The inside story of how Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge—misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health.
The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries—yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals.…
I am a doctor who is lucky enough to have worked in many countries with many people. I wanted to do this ever since I read Albert Sweitzer’s biography when I was about thirteen. I enrolled in medicine as a single parent in my thirties, then built up experience in emergency departments, pediatrics, obstetrics, remote area locum work, and a year in a hospice before beginning my career overseas. Being a doctor was, at one and the same time, exhilarating and terrifying, heartbreaking and absolutely filled with joy. The more I was able to connect to my patients, the more I loved every moment of my work. I hope the books on this list will give that same gift to you.
I absolutely loved the simplicity and clarity of this approach.
It’s almost the opposite end of the spectrum to my first selection and a method that I found more and more common over the years of my career: checklists and flowcharts for the serious and frequent presentations in the Emergency Department, in the operating theatre, and at Triage. And Gawande was right: they did and do save lives.
More generally, I used this process all the time when I was training other staff in my posts with Doctors Without Borders. Preventing and avoiding problems with fail-safe systems is so much better than trying to solve them after they occur!
In his latest bestseller, Atul Gawande shows what the simple idea of the checklist reveals about the complexity of our lives and how we can deal with it.
The modern world has given us stupendous know-how. Yet avoidable failures continue to plague us in health care, government, the law, the financial industry—in almost every realm of organized activity. And the reason is simple: the volume and complexity of knowledge today has exceeded our ability as individuals to properly deliver it to people—consistently, correctly, safely. We train longer, specialize more, use ever-advancing technologies, and still we fail. Atul Gawande makes a…
Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?
By
Joy Loverde,
Everything you need to know to plan for your own safe, financially secure, healthy, and happy old age.
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to help…
As a cancer doctor, I have spent two decades dedicated to understanding the causes and therapy of cancer, how my patients experience their diagnosis and treatment, and how meaningful improvements in their experience should be reflected in the criteria we use to approve cancer drugs approval in the U.S., to improve their lives. In over 100 essays published in outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post and in two books, I sing the stories of my patients as I learn from their undaunted spirits and their utter humanity, as I try to figure out how to be a better doctor, and a better person.
Nobody is perfect. But in medicine, not being perfect can cause injury in another person, or even death.
In When We Do Harm, Ofri tells the stories of patients who fell victim to medical errors, conducting root-cause analyses of how errors occur in the complicated practice of medicine, and the mundane interventions and cultural shift that will be necessary to prevent them in the future.
Medical mistakes are more pervasive than we think. How can we improve outcomes? An acclaimed MD’s rich stories and research explore patient safety.
Patients enter the medical system with faith that they will receive the best care possible, so when things go wrong, it’s a profound and painful breach. Medical science has made enormous strides in decreasing mortality and suffering, but there’s no doubt that treatment can also cause harm, a significant portion of which is preventable. In When We Do Harm, practicing physician and acclaimed author Danielle Ofri places the issues of medical error and patient safety front and…
