A solid account of a battle between government and industry.
The story of a lawsuit that highlighted bureaucratic errors in the health care field.
In his debut nonfiction book, Giovanis recounts his multiyear quest to get the federal government to correct a calculation issue involving hospital reimbursement rates that ended in a multimillion-dollar settlement in favor of the hospitals. The author, a hospital administrator–turned-consultant, opens the book with an overview of his personal history, then moves on to the central issue: He discovered an error in the formula being used to determine the amount of Medicare payments to hospitals, and when he notified Medicare administrators about the problem, they quietly updated the formula but refused to discuss making good on past miscalculations. Giovanis and his colleagues filed suit against the federal government and recruited hospitals to join the action, hoping to gather more than 100 plaintiffs; they ended up with more than 700 hospitals signing on, with Giovanis as the leader and decision-maker. As the lawsuit proceeded, the author’s wife, Jayne, was dying of cancer; this book is both a tribute to her and a celebration of a wrong righted. The author does a good job of highlighting the key elements of a complex, obscure topic with significant financial implications, providing calculation details for readers who may be interested but effectively aiming the majority of the text at a general audience. Although Giovanis is the hero of the narrative, he acknowledges the contributions of his colleagues; as a result, this is the story of a team effort rather than an individual crusade. The lawsuit’s outcome is evident from the book’s subtitle, but the author still manages to maintain tension throughout as he describes the many challenges and setbacks that the plaintiffs encountered. The book also offers some intriguing big-picture insights into the roles of career bureaucrats, the for-profit companies that make money from government programs, and the relationship between them. Overall, it’s a well-written story on a niche topic for an audience of nonspecialists and a compelling look at modern governance.
A solid account of a battle between government and industry.Pub Date: June 22, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-64-543511-2
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Amplify Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
