An important challenge to the naysayers on both sides of the political divide.
Emanuel (Medical Ethics and Health Policy/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Brothers Emanuel: A Memoir of an American Family, 2013, etc.) views the Affordable Care Act as a success story.
The author, who serves as a special White House adviser on health care reform, is optimistic that its glitches will be resolved within the year and that it will transform how patients are cared for over the coming decades. He reprises the complex history of American health care policy beginning in 1942, when the National War Labor Board ruled that health insurance could be treated as a nontaxable fringe benefit despite the wage freeze. The later inclusion of Medicare and Medicaid increased the complexity of the system. Emanuel details the many inequities that developed—most notably, the exclusion of people with pre-existing health conditions from the system and the financial vulnerability of the uninsured, who also frequently receive substandard treatment—e.g.,“Being uninsured means your chance of dying in a car accident is 40% higher than that of a privately insured person.” The author asserts that the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010 “was a historic event,” especially in the context of the ongoing recession and political restraints, coupled with the need to deal with opposition from “physicians, insurers, and pharmaceutical manufacturers” and others. He offers an insider’s account of some of the infighting that occurred within the Obama administration, including his own altercations with his brother, Rahm, then chief of staff to the president. The author takes a long view of the reforms beginning with incentives and penalties for the adoption of uniform electronic health records in the 2009 Recovery Act. The ACA, he writes, “will increasingly be seen as a world historic achievement,” and “Barack Obama will be viewed more like Harry Truman—judged with increasing respect over time.”
An important challenge to the naysayers on both sides of the political divide.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61039-345-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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