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Healthcare economics is indeed a dismal science: Americans pay more for healthcare than anybody in the world but are far from the healthiest population and often find themselves broke and confused after interacting with the country's medical-industrial complex.
Few reporters have done more to investigate the business of healthcare than Elisabeth Rosenthal, a former emergency room doctor and longtime reporter for the New York Times. Rosenthal is now the editor of Kaiser Health News but before leaving the Times last year, she produced an extraordinary series Paying Til It Hurts.
Rosenthal rolled that reporting and much more into a new book "An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take it Back."
The Times ran a terrifying excerpt from the book last week and this week's Sunday New York Times book review includes a review of the book by Yale political science professor Jacob Hacker, a 1989 graduate of Lincoln High School.
In his review, Hacker notes that while he was growing up in Portland, his mother worked as a nurse at Providence St. Vincent Medical Center.
Rosenthal focused on the Providence system in her book and Hacker notes her depiction of his mother's former employer's transformation from Catholic charity to healthcare colossus is far from flattering.
In a cover story last year, WW reported how the Affordable Care Act has been a financial windfall for Providence and other non-profit hospital systems.
Related: The Five Things Hospitals Don't Want You to Know About Obamacare.
