A review by randyrasa
The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town by Brian Alexander

5.0

A deep dive into America's deeply dysfunctional health care system, a monstrous tangle of interconnected and interdependent interests that all too often fails in it's main mission of protecting people's health. No sane person would design this crazy-quilt of a system, where each element is so invested in its own survival that it loses sight of its purpose, but we seem to be stuck with it. The focus here is on a small independent hospital in a small rural community, but the insights are very much applicable across the entire nation, and reflect problems far beyond healthcare. I live in a small town very much like the community profiled here, but I could have sworn many times that they were examining and explaining my town; the situations, though different in details, are exactly the same in the larger sense. I have never felt so seen.

This is not a "fun" read. It is profoundly depressing, disturbing, and maddening. But this is an important book, if you want to understand where we are and how we got here.