Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis

TPMCafe Book Club
Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the
People Who Pay the PriceBy Jonathan Cohn

Health care: The case for thinking big
By Jonathan Cohn

One of the most fascinating products of researching my new book,
Sick, was also one of the most depressing: the realization that we've
been here before.

If you go back to the late 1920s and early 1930s, you'll find a
situation that looks more than vaguely familiar. As medical care was
becoming more expensive, large numbers of people were finding they
literally could not afford to get sick. Many of these people weren't
indigent in the narrow sense of the word. They had homes. They had
jobs. And yet when they got sick, their lives unraveled. Some went
into debt to pay for it. Some rationed their own care. The result was
financial misery, medical hardship, or both.

That situation eventually gave birth to the insurance system we have
today - a system, based primarily upon job-provided private
insurance, that is now faltering as the price of medical care rises.
If you read the eight stories in the book, you'll get a sense not
just of how devastating loss of insurance can be today, but also of
how vulnerable to this problem even the middle class has become -
just like it was nearly a century ago.

It's this increasingly vulnerability that has provoked a new debate
about universal health care - and given would-be reformers some cause
for optimism. But now that this debate is unfolding, it's brought us
to yet another familiar place: The argument about what kind of system
to create.

On one extreme of the progressive political spectrum you have...

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TPMCafe Book Club features an ongoing discussion on health care reform led off by Jonathan Cohn, timed with release of his new book, "Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis---and the People Who Pay the Price."

The online discussion will feature such notables as Jonathan Cohn,
Jacob Hacker, Ezra Klein, Matthew Holt, Roger Hickey, Diane Archer,
Don McCanne and others (incomplete list). Responses of readers are
welcome.

With the renewed enthusiasm for reform, this discussion is very
timely and should be very informative, if not provocative. You can
follow it at:

http://bookclub.tpmcafe.com/