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America's Bitter Pill
- Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 10 mins
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Summary
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.”—The New York Times
America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation.
But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury.
Critic reviews
“An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Steven Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary—a thriller about market structure, government organization and billing practices.”—The New York Times Book Review
“A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system’ . . . For its insights into our nation’s fiscal, psychological and corporeal health—and for our own long-term social well-being—it is a book that deserves to be read and discussed widely by anyone interested in the politics and policy of healthcare.”—Los Angeles Times
“A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform . . . [Brill’s] book brims with unconventional insight delivered in prose completely uninfected by the worn out tropes and tired lingo of the Sunday shows.”—The Daily Beast