The Price We Pay

What Broke American Health Care - and How to Fix It

By: Marty Makary MD

Narrated by: Marty Makary MD

Length: 9 hrs and 29 mins

Publisher's summary

From the New York Times best-selling author of Unaccountable comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system - and the people who are saving it.

One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of price-gouging, middlemen and a series of elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable.

The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well - a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your Library section along with the audio on our Desktop Site.

©2019 Marty Makary (P)2020 Audible, Ltd

Info you need to know

Great info for the lay person and the professional. I will recommend this to friends family coworkers!

a book worth reading

great insights into our medical, care delivery systems. told in an interesting way.

how did we get here? super reading. absorbing too.

Great informative book

This is a really important book. The Big Short for healthcare Let's take these lessons and change direction.

Great information, I wish more within healthcare would read and heed.

Many excellent points were brought up, from Medical education, to use of plain English from Doctor to Patient

Great Read

A great vantage point of American healthcare and it’s disparities. So many truths in this write up.

Goes over the symptoms, but not the root problem

Dr. Makary and his team have done excellent work to find and expose many of the problems in our healthcare system. But like a lot of modern medicine, this book is focused on the symptoms rather than the root cause. I don't want to sound overly critical, because this is a great book that should be read by all voting Americans or anyone who plans to get medical treatment during their lifetime. However, it mostly fails to address the single most important cause of nearly all the problems highlighted in the book.

Perhaps Dr. Makary was trying to avoid being too similar to Catastrophic Care by David Goldhill, which is referenced in this book. Both are necessary and 'must read' texts, but Catastrophic Care gets to the root of all the problems while The Price We Pay goes into depth about many of the symptoms created by the root cause.

Analogy: If the American healthcare system is an obese patient with hypertension, diabetes, sleep apnea, and joint pain, The Price We Pay goes into depth about specific issues that cause each condition (blocked arteries, high blood sugar, obstructions around the airway, inflammation, etc) and how to remedy each separate condition with specific treatments, while Catastrophic Care ties all the symptoms to the root cause of obesity and explains how losing weight will likely get rid of all the symptoms and bring the patient back to a more healthy state.

This is a great book and very worthy of your time and attention. But, in my opinion, it is secondary to Catastrophic Care in explaining the deficiencies of the American healthcare system. I highly suggest you read/listen to both books.

Eye opening

I work in healthcare and have heard of a some of these issues but there was so much more that was shocking. The book is thorough and has solutions. It’s unbelievable that we allow these companies to operate this way and it has to stop. When you take your animal to the vet, you get an itemized estimate with high end and the breakdown of all they plan to do. You agree before they proceed. This could be the way for us to work in healthcare too. So we can know if the work is affordable and we want it or not. Thank you for this work!

Deep and relevant insights into our health care .

Really enjoyed and learned a lot.
Thank you for your commitment
and explanation about what's broken in our
Healthcare system. Thank you Dr Makary!

Price of Health Care Can Make You Sick

The subject of pricing of heath care will make you sick. Dr. Malady exposes a health care system gone wild with price gouging, procedure mark ups and the filing of lawsuits for those who cannot pay. Where is the humanity?

Great explanation of the problems in U.S Healthcare

Everyone should read this in order to understand how perverse the current system is and how we are screwed at every turn. It is a call to action.