06 Jul 2015 Medicare’s Victims: Order Your Copy!

Finally!  Today is the official release of my book, Medicare’s Victims: How the U.S. Government’s Largest Health Care Program Harms Patients and Impairs Physicians!

It is available at Amazon.com, both paperback ($14.99) and Kindle ($6.99).

For those of you who have an eReader other than Kindle (i.e., it uses an ePub file) you can purchase the book at Lulu.com ($6.99).

UPDATE: It is also available at iBooks ($6.99).

I’ll be doing my first interview for the book today on the Bill LuMaye show, at about 3:15 Eastern time.

Finally, here are some excerpts from David Catron’s review of Medicare’s Victims at the American Spectator:

And what about the seniors who constitute the vast majority of Medicare beneficiaries? Surely, considering the enthusiasm with which single-payer advocates push Medicare-for-All, seniors fare better than the disabled. In fact, seniors endure countless hardships pursuant to the regulatory and reimbursement snarl in which they and their doctors find themselves immured by Medicare. It is in the care of seniors that the bureaucrats most brazenly substitute their judgment for that of health care professionals. The magnitude of this travesty is difficult to appreciate unless one has witnessed, as I have, a doctor violently slam down the phone after being told by Medicare that a septuagenarian suffering with congestive heart failure fails to “meet criteria” for an inpatient admission.

The perversity with which Medicare applies these criteria beggars belief. One of the stories Hogberg relates is that of a dialysis patient who had suffered kidney failure after a bout with cancer. He suddenly grew ill one morning and was rushed to a nearby ER where the doctors were informed in minute detail of his health status: “Frank needed dialysis, but under Medicare’s rules, he couldn’t receive it at a hospital unless he was an inpatient.” Like the patient noted above, he failed to “meet criteria.” Thus, he and his doctors were forced to wait until his condition deteriorated far enough to satisfy Medicare. At length he had a seizure, whereupon he was finally admitted and received dialysis: “Frank briefly recovered, but the damage was done.” Within a few months he died.

….Hogberg does not, however, despair of reforming the program. This brings us back to his proposal to give Medicare’s beneficiaries control over how the money is spent. Is it crazy to give Medicare funds directly to patients? Well, as Hogberg points out, this is precisely how Social Security works: “Beneficiaries receive their checks… each month and then have complete discretion over how to spend it.”

Hogberg would do away with Medicare parts A and B and replace them with “a Basic Account and a Major Medical Account.… The amount in these accounts will be renewed every year.” The idea is that beneficiaries should purchase health care the same way they buy other goods and services. The plan is obviously far too detailed to fully flesh out in this space, and any reform of Medicare has profound political implications, but Hogberg’s ideas are eminently sensible. Medicare’s Victims hits the shelves today. It’s well worth a read for anyone with a desire to understand how Medicare actually works.