Sick & Tired: How America’s Health Care System Fails Its Patients, by Helene Jorgensen

There are two parts of this book that tell most of what a reader of this work will need to know going in. The cover of the book shows a patient in a hospital gown pushing a stone of Sisyphus [1] up a mountain. The back of the book contains a long list of Progressive (i.e. leftist) books on various political matters. It therefore ought to come as no surprise that this book argues for a leftist solution to the health care mess, namely the expansion of medicare-level care for all Americans. The book even manages to be sanguine (if slightly critical) about the changes to the health care system that are now beginning to come online, critical mainly in their not being radical enough, and sanguine about the wide degree of popularity for massive health care reform among the general public.

Despite the very clear political bias of the book (which, thankfully, is mostly present in the ending section), for the most part this book is not an unpleasant one to read. By and large the book aims at a combination of pointed commentary about the corrupt and broken nature of the health care system as well as making an appeal to pity by the author referring to her own experiences in dealing with a very lengthy recovery from Lyme disease. Her own personal experiences in dealing with a particularly difficult disease (namely, Lyme disease in one of its more virulent forms) informs her own cynicism about the way that the medical system operates in all of its various aspects. These aspects she comments on with a great deal of flair and a lot of anecdotal stories as well as statistics.

A great deal of the difficulties of our medical system spring from perverse design. I would wholeheartedly agree with the author that the structure of our medical system, by rewarding doctors for inefficiency and billing for services rather than being paid a salary that would encourage them to help provide for successful treatment rather than merely wish to bill for multiple visits or large numbers of tests simply to increase payment from the patient through their insurance company. Likewise, the author of this book (and no doubt many people) have very little trust in any aspect of the medical system, whether it is in drug companies sending former cheerleaders to charm doctors into writing prescriptions for their medicines, in insurance companies and laboratories and doctors that routinely engage in fraudulent shenanigans to improve their profits, or whether it is even in the corrupt way that medical standards for diseases are made in the first place, with all kinds of vested interests.

The only part of this book that rings false is the fact that the author has an unwarranted degree of trust in the government and in public hospitals and public initiatives in having more virtue than the private systems that the author castigates rather mercilessly in this volume. The problem is that there is no reason to trust the federal governments or state governments more than private enterprise. This book spends the vast majority of its space looking at the mess that private companies and for-profit efforts have made of the health care industry, as well as in trying to counteract arguments about the rationing of health care by pointing to the “price rationing” of care in the present system, but then there is no meaningful explanation of how a corrupt and bankrupt government is supposed to be any better than the private enterprise system the author disagrees with so seriously. After all, while many other nations have relatively successful universal health care, such nations also have a certain level of cultural cohesion that our nation lacks, as well as a certain trust and faith in government that our nation as a whole lacks. That trust cannot be coerced; it must be built, and in the absence of faith in government, no public solution to such a serious problem can be successful. Overall, therefore, while this book is a serious indictment of our medical system, it fails to provide any reasonable and better option that could exist given the state of mistrust in our society.

[1] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/stones-of-sisyphus/