How to Make a Killing: Death, Dollars and the Business of Blood

(Hardback, Main)

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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.

Reviews

A rich and sweeping saga that is, sadly, a quintessentially American story: How a miracle medical machine transformed into profit machine, sick and suffering patients be damned. -- Jesse Eisinger
[A] beautifully written and fascinating account of both the miraculous possibilities of medical technology and the perils of poorly structured markets. -- Matt Stoller
A terrifying story of profit before patients, and a chilling glimpse of what can happen when private companies are allowed to take charge of healthcare. -- Gavin Francis
Tom Mueller goes deep, then wide, then straight for the jugular of the corporate predators who are getting rich by exploiting the poor and vulnerable. Anybody who can read How to Make a Killing without getting outraged must be unconscious. This book raised my blood pressure by at least thirty points -- Carl Elliott
Inspiring and deeply distressing.....Illustrates how modern medicine could devise technologies to literally revive people dying of kidney failure and how such miracles became perverted * Ezekiel J. Emanuel *

Author Bio

Tom Mueller is a New York Times bestselling author whose previous books include Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud and Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, and the Atlantic Monthly. He divides his time between the Pacific Northwest and Italy.