With tender, conscientious storytelling, The People’s Hospital introduces readers to five uninsured Houstonians who are each struggling with life-threatening ailments and denied critical care until they arrive at Ben Taub Hospital, where physician Ricardo Nuila works. There, at the largest safety-net hospital in the city, they find a crucial model of compassionate, innovative healthcare that should inspire policy and practice across the country.
The People’s Hospital diagnoses the state of the U.S. medical system. Nuila traces the disturbing entanglements of insurance companies, doctors, hospitals, and Big Pharma that put earning money far above providing care. In this system, which he shorthands “Medicine Inc.,” people’s medical problems are metabolized into profit. At the heart of this accounting, however, is a powerful foil: a hospital community that actually treats healthcare as a human right. Nuila weaves together stories of his patients and family members with tremendous reflections on challenges, consequences, and remedies for the U.S. medical system. Ben Taub, he writes, “is an excellent classroom.”
The People’s Hospital is a love letter to that classroom, “where people find healthcare and revere it like a treasure.” And it is a call to action for practitioners, politicians, and the public to protect the most vulnerable among us by championing science and medicine for the collective good. [Description by Rethinking Schools.]
ISBN: 9781501198052 | Scribner Book Company
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