Awards

• Short-listed for NYPL Helen Bernstein Award 2024

Overview

Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: a treatment that made kidney failure a manageable condition instead of a death sentence. And yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care. A gripping microcosm of American health care gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s—when transplants and early dialysis machines offered hope—gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing (and profiting from) life-saving care. After Congress made renal disease the only “Medicare for All” condition, Big Dialysis proliferated, and the Hippocratic oath gave way to the profit motive. A triumph of investigative research, Tom Mueller’s book features an unforgettable cast of characters: CEOs who dress as Musketeers to exhort more aggressive profit-seeking, nephrologist insiders who reveal the substandard care this causes, and heroic patients who risk their lives to reveal the truth.

Full Product Details

9780393866513

Table of Contents

Reviews

Tom Mueller goes deep, then wide, then straight for the jugular of the corporate predators who are getting rich by exploiting the poor and vulnerable. Anybody who can read How to Make a Killing without getting outraged must be unconscious. This book raised my blood pressure by at least thirty points. -- Carl Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat and Better than Well I loved Tom Mueller's beautifully written and fascinating account of both the miraculous possibilities of medical technology and the perils of poorly structured markets. There is universal medical care in the United States, but only for kidney disease. How a program started by Richard Nixon and corrupted by finance has saved lives, and cost them, is the story of modern America. -- Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy

"""Tom Mueller goes deep, then wide, then straight for the jugular of the corporate predators who are getting rich by exploiting the poor and vulnerable. Anybody who can read How to Make a Killing without getting outraged must be unconscious. This book raised my blood pressure by at least thirty points."" -- Carl Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat and Better than Well ""I loved Tom Mueller's beautifully written and fascinating account of both the miraculous possibilities of medical technology and the perils of poorly structured markets. There is universal medical care in the United States, but only for kidney disease. How a program started by Richard Nixon and corrupted by finance has saved lives, and cost them, is the story of modern America."" -- Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The Hundred Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy"

Author Information

Tom Mueller’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling Extra Virginity about food fraud, and Crisis of Conscience on whistleblowers and their enemies.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available