Friday, May 25, 2007

Sick Author: Jonathan Cohn Publisher: Harper Collins ASIN: 0060580453

About This Book

According to the new book "Sick" by Jonathan Cohn, America's health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families and are unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular check-ups, let alone for hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing their health or even their lives. In this work of original reportage,Cohn travels across the U.S., the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care, to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see, first-hand, its impact on ordinary people.

Cohn tells tragic and infuriating stories. In Boston, a heart attack victim becomes a casualty of emergency room overcrowding when she is turned away from the one hospital that could treat her. In South Central L.A., a security guard loses part of his vision when he can't find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the middle of the prairie heartland, a retired meatpacker sells his house to pay for the medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. And, in a tiny village tucked into the Catskill mountains, a mother of three young children decides against a costly doctor's visit and lets a deadly cancer go undetected because her husband's job no longer provides health insurance.

"Sick" weaves these stories with reporting from Washington and inside the medical industry. This book is a chronicle the decline of American's health care systemand it lays bare the consequences if we don't replace it.