Why Our Health Matters

Starred review from August 1, 2009
Rather than another advisor on healthy living, Weils new book is a remarkably comprehensive brief for health-care reform. Three long-held American beliefsthe U.S. health care system is the best in the world, U.S. medical technology is that systems greatest asset, and U.S. medical schools and research facilities produce the best physicians and medical knowledgeare now just myths, he says, as comparisons with other nations health statistics and trends in domestic health confirm. Moreover, the systems costliness is bankrupting American business as well as the government. What is needed instead is a system in which doctors interact with patients much more than they do now; in which all citizens receive care; and in which insurance and carethe latter considered an art, not an industryare affordable. The prevention of disease and the promotion of health should animate such a system, and if they entail legal restrictions on bad food similar to those on alcohol and tobacco, so be it. Essential to realizing this better system are reforming medical education to reverse the enormous recent decline in general and family practitioners and to restore nonpharmaceutical and non-high-tech means of healing to the medical armamentarium; closing for-profit hospitals; and stringently regulating if not eliminating the for-profit insurance, drug, and medical-hardware industries. Health-care reform is the big American domestic issue of the day. This book is the one to read to think broadly, deeply, and clearly about it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)