How to Make a Killing

Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine

De: Tom Mueller

Narrado por: Melissa Kay Benson

Six decades ago, visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney, acknowledged since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart, became the first human organ to be successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations, ambitious doctor-entrepreneurs, and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early experiment in for-profit medicine—and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes.

With powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting, Tom Mueller introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients risk their lives to blow the whistle on how they've been mistreated. An unpaid activist living in a south Georgia trailer park fights to save patients from involuntary discharge from their lifesaving care. Industry insiders put their careers on the line to speak out about the endemic wrongs and pervasive inequality they've witnessed—and about dialysis executives who dress as musketeers and Star Wars characters to exhort their employees to more aggressive profit-seeking.

How to Make a Killing reveals dialysis as a microcosm of American medicine and poses a vital challenge: find a way to fix dialysis, and we'll have a fighting chance of fixing our country's dysfunctional healthcare system as a whole, restoring patients, not profits, as its true purpose.

©2023 Tom Mueller (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Eye opening information & insight...and noir

I loved the insight into for-profits medical care and HOW it becomes corrupt.
Also, the window into Dialysis history and all the difficulties that entangle it to this day.
HOWEVER, as much as I loved this book, all the noir descriptions and settings made this my most difficult book to listen through to date.

Good read on systemic inequity and dysfunction in healthcare

The rise of private equity controlled big dialysis is case study that connects the dots to the main pillars of US healthcare dysfunction and makes a lot of abstract conversations on the need for healthcare reform concrete and sobering.

NME - The McDonald’izing of healthcare

This is clearly a problem that spans a small library. Obviously this industry wide health care failure spawned the disaster of Obamacare in 2007. Who do you think designed the government takeover, a bailout for the industry.