The Hidden History of American Health..., Thom Hartmann
The Hidden History of American Health..., Thom Hartmann
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The Hidden History of American Healthcare
Why Sickness Bankrupts You and Makes Others Insanely Rich

Author: Thom Hartmann

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 3 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 09/07/2021


Synopsis

Popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality.

"For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people-one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s," says Thom Hartmann. Taiwan's single-payer system enabled the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down its economy, resulting in just seven deaths, while in the United States more than 350,000 have died.

Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current "sickness for profit" system. Modern attempts to create some kind of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn-including Obamacare, which Hartmann regards as basically a sellout to the health insurance industry.

There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann describes the extraordinary benefits it would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It is time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege.

About Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. Hartmann is also an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics.

The cofounder (with his wife, Louise) and former Executive Director of The New England Salem Children's Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children.

He has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD).

A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the "Younger/Older Culture model" for describing the underpinnings-and possible solutions-to the world's ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural "stories" which go back thousands of years.

Leonardo DiCaprio was inspired by Thom's book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight to make the movie "The 11th Hour" (in which Thom appears), and a series of environmental videos narrated by Hartmann and DiCaprio, available at Green World Rising.

Talkers Magazine named Thom Hartmann as the most important progressive talk show host in America for the past decade, and for three of the past five years the #1 most important progressive host, in their "Heavy Hundred" ranking. His radio show is syndicated on for-profit radio stations nationwide by WYD Media, on non-profit and community stations nationwide by Pacifica, across the entire North American continent on SiriusXM Satellite radio, on cable systems nationwide by Cable Radio Network (CRN) and Free Speech TV, on its own YouTube channel, via subscription podcasts, worldwide through the US American Forces Network, and through the Thom Hartmann App in the App Store. The radio show is also simulcast as TV in realtime into nearly 60 million US and Canadian homes by the Free Speech TV Network on Dish Network, DirectTV, and cable TV systems nationwide.

As an entrepreneur, he's founded several successful businesses which still are operating, and lived and worked with his wife, Louise, and their three (now adult) children on several continents.

He was born and grew up in Michigan, and retains strong ties to the Midwest, although he and Louise have lived in New Hampshire, Vermont, Georgia, Germany, Washington DC, and Oregon.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Scott on August 12, 2021

In my early twenties, I decided to devote my life to bettering American healthcare. I gained exposure to the system as a medical student and still contribute professionally by bettering medical research through software development. My experiences show that many inefficiencies and much greed exist i......more

Goodreads review by Mackenzie on February 25, 2025

Everyone needs to read this book to understand the current politics of healthcare in America. Very well explained and not too complex at all, great summary & easy to read.......more

Goodreads review by David on December 18, 2021

There is a lot packed in this short book. To be sure, it's a persuasive account of why a single-pay central health care system makes sense, and why the US needs to stop being the lone holdout among developed nations to continue feeding the failed experiment of for-profit healthcare providers. Even m......more

Goodreads review by Shauna on January 09, 2022

This is a timely, accessible, and incredibly important read. Early in the book, Hartmann details the horrifying ways that insurance companies resign people to death rather than paying for procedures, underlining the horrors of the privatized healthcare system we have in the US. Rather than healthcare......more

Goodreads review by Behrooz on May 28, 2023

I listened to the unabridged 4-hour audio version of this title (read by Sean Pratt, Koehler Publishers, 2021). The book's subtitle says it all: The US healthcare system is designed not to keep you healthy but to generate maximum revenue for hospitals, insurance companies, big pharma, and their exec......more