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America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
Format: MP3 128 Kbps, Mono, 44.100 Hz
Language: English
Author: Steven Brill
Date: 2015
Narrator: Don Woren
Provider: Random House Audio
Running Time: 17 h 10 min
Description
America's Bitter Pill is Steven Brill's much-anticipated, sweeping narrative of 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. Brill probed the depths of our nation's healthcare crisis in his trailblazing Time magazine Special Report, which won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Public Interest. Now he broadens his lens and delves deeper, pulling no punches and taking no prisoners.
It's a fly-on-the-wall account of the fight, amid an onslaught of lobbying, to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America's largest, most dysfunctional industry - an industry larger than the entire economy of France.
It's a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his Time 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.
Brill questions all the participants in the drama, including the president, to find out what happened and why.
He asks the head of the agency in charge of the Obamacare website how and why it crashed.
And he tells the cliffhanger story of the tech wizards who swooped in to rebuild it.
Brill gets drug lobbyists to open up on the deals they struck to protect their profits in return for supporting the law.
And he buttresses all these accounts with meticulous research and access to internal memos, emails, notes, and journals written by the key players during all the pivotal moments.
Brill is there with patients when they are denied cancer care at a hospital, or charged $77 for a box of gauze pads. Then he asks the multimillion-dollar executives who run the hospitals to explain why.
About the Author
Steven Brill has written for The New Yorker, Time, and The New York Times Magazine. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he also founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. Brill was the author of Time’s March 4, 2013, Special Report “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” for which he won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Public Service. Brill also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to encourage and enable talented young people to become journalists. He is married, with three adult children, and lives in New York. |
