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In this strident, necessary, meticulously researched book Michael Fine uses the COVID-19 pandemic and many other examples to show the costly failure of the American health care system in bold relief.
Hospitals, insurance companies, Big Pharma, specialists, and even primary care doctors have all become tools of the new health profiteers. On Medicine as Colonialism shows how the American health care system cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world. Focusing on how health care profiteers co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid to extract resources from communities, this book reveals how medicine and health care have become tools of a new health colonialism, turning medicine on its head, so that individuals and communities lose their agency, health becomes impossible, and profits are used to dismantle democracy itself.
“On Medicine as Colonialism details the sociopolitical
realities that undergird health injustice and offers a realistic
perspective on achieving health equity.”
—Jewel Mullen, MD, MPH, Dell Medical School, UT Austin
“A sobering diatribe on health care in America.”
—David N. Sundwall, former executive director of the Utah Department of Health
“Michael Fine wins his big-hearted argument that American
medicine is colonialism, not just for the poor but for all of us. It is a
desecration of our health care system by the same old robber barons. . .
. This doctor-activist is pointing us to solutions. Everyone should
read it.”
—Samuel Shem, author and professor of medical humanities, NYU
Medical School
“Fine writes with the eye of both a humanist and a
practitioner. . . . His passion for individual lives and concern for the
common good is what drives his outrage at what has been wrought.”
—Christopher Koller, president of the Milbank Fund, from the foreword
“Michael Fine is one of the true heroes of primary care over several decades.”
—Dr. Doug Henley, CEO and executive vice president of the American Academy of Family Physicians
“As Rhode Island’s director of health, Dr. Fine brought a vision of a humane, local, integrated health care system that focused as much on health as on disease and treatment.”
—U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
“Michael Fine has given us an extraordinary biopic on healthcare in America based on the authority of his forty-year career as writer, community organizer, family physician, and public health official.”
—Fitzhugh Mullan, MD
Chapter One: Medicine and Colonialism
Chapter Two: Hospitals
Chapter Three: Pharma and Pharmaceutical Retailers
Chapter Four: Specialists, Surgi-centers, Radiologists, Cardiologists, and Tests
Chapter Five: Administrators, Consultants, Lawyers, Doctors
Chapter Six: Primary Care
Chapter Seven: Insurance Companies
Chapter Eight: Research
Chapter Nine: Medical Colonialism as, well, Colonialism Itself
Chapter Ten: Covid-19
Chapter Eleven: Final Thoughts, Summary and Conclusions, and a Little About How to Fix This Mess