Synopses & Reviews
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—unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans.
The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating. 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 high-tech job no longer provides health insurance.
Passionate, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick interweaves these stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington and takes us inside the medical industry to chronicle 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.
Review
“An 80-year chronology of repeated market failure. . . . Read it and weep.” Slate
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“A terrific new book on our dysfunctional health care system.” Paul Krugman, The New York Times
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“This is a stunningly important book. Jonathan Cohn lays bare the tragedy of our health care system.” Atul Gawande, author of Complications
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“In Sick, Jonathan Cohn . . . has written a call-to-arms for a complete transformation of American medicine.” Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here
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Sick is one of those rare books that combines the personal with the sharply analytical. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights
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“Cohns book will infuriate you enough to make you want to scream at every member of Congress, ‘Read this!” David K. Shipler, author of The Working Poor
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“No one has thought harder about our heath care system than Jonathan Cohn.” E.J. Dionne, Jr., syndicated columnist and author of Why Americans Hate Politics
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“Jonathan Cohns Sick is an eye-opening work on healthcare in America told through the stories of those in need.” Jerome Groopman, author of The Anatomy of Hope
About the Author
Jonathan Cohn is a senior editor at The New Republic, where he has written about national politics and its impact on American communities for the past decade. He is also a contributing editor at The American Prospect and a senior fellow at the think tank Demos. Cohn, who has been a media fellow with the Kaiser Family Foundation, has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Slate, and The Washington Monthly. A graduate of Harvard, he lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his wife and two children.