The Best Health Policy eBooks of All Time

Popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. "For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people—one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s,” says Thom Hartmann. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient.

Taiwan’s single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States. Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current “sickness for profit” system. Modern attempts to create versions of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn, including Obamacare. There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann outlines the extraordinary benefits this system would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It’s time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege.

Jonathan Cohn's The Ten Year War is the definitive account of the battle over Obamacare, based on interviews with sources who were in the room, from one of the nation's foremost healthcare journalists. The Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” was the most sweeping and consequential piece of legislation of the last half century. It has touched nearly every American in one way or another, for better or worse, and become the defining political fight of our time.

In The Ten Year War, veteran journalist Jonathan Cohn offers the compelling, authoritative history of how the law came to be, why it looks like it does, and what it’s meant for average Americans. Drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews, plus private diaries, emails and memos, The Ten Year War takes readers to Capitol Hill and to town hall meetings, inside the West Wing and, eventually, into Trump Tower, as the nation's most powerful leaders try to reconcile pragmatism and idealism, self-interest and the public good, and ultimately two very different visions for what the country should look like. At the heart of the book is the decades-old argument over what’s wrong with American health care and how to fix it. But the battle over healthcare was always about more than policy. The Ten Year War offers a deeper examination of how our governing institutions, the media and the two parties have evolved, and the dysfunction those changes have left in their wake.

The true, eye-opening account of how the NHS has been failed and what we can do to save it. ‘The NHS is an institution. But it’s also a political football, kicked back and forth between politicians for the past 75 years. It’s a burden to some and a potent vote-winner for others. It’s a construct, framed in the media. It’s a set of ideas and a logo. It’s a workplace for many and the birthplace of almost all of us. It’s become a valued part of our society, it is extraordinarily special – and it’s being destroyed.’. The NHS is at crisis point.

In the 75 years since it was founded on the dream of making healthcare accessible to everyone, its principles have been chipped away at and disregarded by successive political leaders. The result: an underfunded, understaffed, exhausted workforce, a decimation of patient services and the infiltration of privatisation within our public healthcare system. We are now in danger of losing what we have come to depend upon: the NHS is collapsing and a two-tier healthcare system is emerging in its place. We can stop this, but only if we do it together. In her first book, Dr Julia Grace Patterson, founder of EveryDoctor and fierce advocate for the future of the NHS, lays bare the truth about the current state of our healthcare system and sets forth transformational ideas on how we could save it. A book built on a love of the NHS at its heart, Critical is a must-read for anyone who wants it to survive for another 75 years.