America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
by Steven Brill
View on GoodreadsThe Affordable Care Act changed who gets covered and left what you get charged almost untouched. Brill reports it from both ends: the lobbying and deal-making that wrote the bill, and the hospital economics it left alone. Then he ends up a patient himself, after open-heart surgery.
Core ideas
- Buying acquiescence: The industry got more paying customers in exchange for leaving prices alone.
- The chargemaster: The list price no hospital can explain is where the money actually sits, and reform never touched it.
- The real counterparty: Consolidated hospital systems now out-negotiate the insurers, so any serious reform has to go through them.
Published2015
Pages512
ISBN9780812996951
ReadAug 2026
