America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill (Author)
About the author
Steven Brill has written for The New Yorker, Time, and The New York Times Magazine. A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he also founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. Brill was the author of Time’s March 4, 2013, Special Report “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” for which he won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Public Service. Brill also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to encourage and enable talented young people to become journalists. He is married, with three adult children, and lives in New York.
About this book
America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation.
But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury.
Table of contents
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1 Looking Up from the Gurney
CHAPTER 2 Center Stage
CHAPTER 3 Max, Barack, Hillary, Billy, and the Gathering Consensus
CHAPTER 4 “This Is What I Thought the Senate Would Be Like”
CHAPTER 5 A New President Commits, and His Camp Divides
CHAPTER 6 Every Lobbyist’s Favorite Date
CHAPTER 7 Punting to Capitol Hill
CHAPTER 8 Deal Time
CHAPTER 9 Behind Closed Doors: White House Turf Wars, Industry Deals, and Senate Wrangling
CHAPTER 10 The Tea Party Summer, “I’m Feeling Lucky,” and “You Lie”
CHAPTER 11 Snow Jobs, Poison Pills, and Botox
CHAPTER 12 New Trouble, Then Mount Everest
PART TWO
CHAPTER 13 In Washington “Everything Is Slipping,” but Not in Kentucky
CHAPTER 14 An Office Becomes a Center—and It Matters
CHAPTER 15 Meantime, Outside the Beltway …
CHAPTER 16 Waiting for Obamacare
CHAPTER 17 A Guy in Jeans, Red Lights, and a “Train Wreck”
CHAPTER 18 Two Months to Go
CHAPTER 19 Thirty Days to Go
PART THREE
CHAPTER 20 The Crash
CHAPTER 21 Meltdown in D.C., Dancing on Eight in Kentucky, and Frustration in Ohio
CHAPTER 22 The Rescue
CHAPTER 23 The Finish Line
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 24 Stuck in the Jalopy
Length: 528 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint edition (August 18, 2015)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0812986687
ISBN-13: 978-0812986686