Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the People Who Pay the Price

America's health care system is unraveling, with millions of hard-working people unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Jonathan Cohn traveled across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee its citizens access to medical care—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans. Passionate, powerful, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick chronicles the decline of America's health care system, and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.

Customer Reviews:

Cohn has the passion of a muckraker and the erudition of a scholar

By Stephen R. Laniel - June 30, 2007

I can't recommend this book highly enough. At first glance, one might expect its structure to be gimmicky:

1. Interview someone who suffered because of our country's health-insurance system.
2. Zoom out from that person to explain the political and economic background to his or her suffering.
3. Zoom back in.
4. Repeat 2) and 3) a few times.
5. Move on to the next person and repeat from step 1).

Far from being a gimmick, I couldn't imagine a better narrative device. Jonathan Cohn combines the passion of a muckraking journalist with the erudition of a historian. His delivery is simple, unpretentious, and never cloying.

His conclusion is simple: health insurance as delivered by private companies doesn't work, because their incentive is always to cut services to the bone; the ideal hospital for an insurer is one that has no patients. The history of health insurance, as Cohn tells it, is the history of nonprofit corporations... read more

Our Dysfunctional Health Care System

By Izaak VanGaalen - May 22, 2007

Why this book is subtitled "The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis - And the People Who Pay the Price" is beyond me. Everyone has a story about the failure of our health care system or "non-system" and everyone is paying the price. Not only is it becoming more obvious by the day, almost every presidential contender is promising some kind of reform.

Jonathan Cohn of The New Republic has given us a number of revealing and disturbing case studies, each indicating system failure; and with each study he gives us some historical background as to how certain institutions - Medicare, Medicaid, managed care, employer-based health insurance, etc. - came to be. The historical background is good because is shows that there was no single policy or grand design behind our current mess; it is more a product of haphazard decisions made over a long period of time.

Let's look at some facts. America spends about $7,000 per capita on health care annually, about twice... read more

Thoughtful analysis

By Anthony M. Zipple - April 16, 2007

The US health care system is not in good shape and this book suggests some of the reasons. 40% of US citizens with problems do not get care due to cost issues. Patient satisfaction is lower in the US than in Canada, the UK and many other countries with some form a national plan. The US spends more than any other country with worse overall results and lower rates of coverage in the population than any other industrial country. We spend less on preventive care as a percentage of expenditures than any industrial nation. In 2004, 35% of Americans believe that the US health care system needed fundamental rebuilding.

I could go on, but the clear FACT is that US health care is in bad shape and getting worse quickly for many, many Americans. What is the solution? A single payer system is a good start. Only those ideologically paranoid about government (anyone who still thinks that the current Administration in DC is doing a good job, that global warming is a hoax, and that... read more