Students of health economics and policymakers will find the doctor’s diagnoses and prescriptions well worth considering.
A leading oncologist and medical ethicist turns a gimlet eye on the health care systems of the world’s leading economies and finds most of them wanting.
Where’s the best place in the world to be sick? To judge by Emanuel’s findings, if you have a condition that will allow you to live awhile, the U.S. isn’t bad; it leads the world in medical innovations and finding cures or treatments for unusual ailments. By other measures, the U.S. ranks well down the list of the 11 systems he analyzes here: “It significantly underperforms on numerous dimensions,” writes the author. China may be worse, in part because its system of health care is hospital-centric: “There are vanishingly few physician offices or other ambulatory centers to deliver care.” Consequently, with the current COVID-19 crisis, Chinese people needing treatment flooded the country’s hospitals and overwhelmed them. In many parts of that country, Emanuel writes, hospitals are few and far between, forcing patients to travel far from home for treatment. Canadians have it better except in the remoter reaches of the far north; Emanuel acknowledges that Canadian health care has its problems even while noting that conservative critics in the U.S. have vastly overestimated the problem of waiting times for treatment. Britain’s system is worse but not terrible. The author offers numerous methods for improving systems around the world. Some may be unpalatable to libertarian advocates of privacy. For example, Taiwan was able to keep a lid, relatively speaking, on COVID-19, because medical data are centralized with passports and other key documents, so that it was easy to identify Taiwanese who had visited mainland China and test and, if necessary, quarantine them. Among Emanuel’s recommendations are to provide universal coverage, simplify data flows and insurance programs, and regulate drug prices—which are sky-high in the U.S.
Students of health economics and policymakers will find the doctor’s diagnoses and prescriptions well worth considering.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-9773-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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