Abigail Zuger’s review thoughtful of Steven Brill’s “America’s Bitter Pill”
“Never sign up for a tour of the sausage factory, not if you want to keep eating sausage…Steven Brill has put together a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American health care circa 2014 — a tour de force inspection of both sausage and factory.
The health business [is] totally awesome till someone goes and gets sick. Mr. Brill’s own perspective took a similar lurch when in the spring of 2014 he underwent repair of an aortic aneurysm, an expensive and complicated procedure. As a patient, he writes, “I was anything but the well-informed, tough consumer with lots of options that a robust free market counts on. I was a puddle.”
…the fatal flaw in market-based medical care: Patients and their relatives simply cannot be savvy shoppers. Their attentions are elsewhere.