PublishedProfile Trade, October 2023 |
ISBN9781800818422 |
FormatHardcover, 288 pages |
Dimensions24cm × 16.2cm × 3cm |
Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: developing a treatment that transformed kidney failure from a death sentence to a manageable condition. Yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care.
A gripping account of privatised healthcare gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s - when transplants and dialysis machines offered hope - gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing and profiting from life-saving care, and how Big Dialysis proliferated at the expense of its patients.
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.