About my upcoming book: America’s Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era

I’m taking the opportunity here to let you know about my new book, to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press on August 11^th. You can preorder on Amazon by clicking here. Or you can pre-order on Johns Hopkins Press by clicking here. A big advantage to using the Hopkins site is that you can get a 30% price discount by using this 4-letter code: HTWN.

The title is: America’s Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era. In the midst of my teaching and other commitments, it took me about 6 years to get my final manuscript to Hopkins Press. I sense that the timeliness and relevance of the book’s message is still as urgent as ever.

Large numbers of Americans are upset and angry at various manifestations of our health and medical care crisis, including: private equity financialization; monopoly and growing corporate concentration; pushback against diversity, equity, and inclusion; extreme and ever-increasing levels of cost sharing on patients; excessive prior authorization mandates; privatization of public goods such as Medicare and Medicaid; victimization of workers and consumers via non-disclosure agreements, non-compete clauses, mandatory arbitration clauses, and more. On and on.

Many Americans see these manifestations as discrete and disconnected. I see them as inter-connected manifestations of a national and global phenomenon: the neoliberal politico-economic movement that captured the US and large portions of the world starting in the 1970s and taking off like a rocket in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.

Health and medical care were not direct targets of the neoliberal revolution. Still, the broad impact of this revolution could not leave our health and medical care systems unaffected. The results are the distress and mess that we see all over US health and medicine today.

I conclude that the neoliberal era’s dominance came to an end by late 2020 even though many of its manifestations endure, just as elements of the prior New Deal Era have lasted way beyond the end of that era in 1980.

How and why did the neoliberal revolution happen? How serious and ongoing has been the damage to our health and medical care systems? Where do the Trump 1, the Biden, and the Trump 2 Administrations fit into this story? What are the prospects for change and improvement today? These are the topics I cover in the book that will be available on August 11.

I hope that this book will help Americans to make sense of our health and medical care systems’ failures and point the way to a better future. I’m hoping for a vigorous public conversation in which I hope YOU can take part. Please feel welcome to contact and connect with me about this and thanks for subscribing to my Substack column where I will communicate about the ups and downs of my publishing journey.