"We All Die Once" is a riveting account of the past, present, and future of American medicine. From prenatal care to the end of life, this book uses history, analysis, and dramatic personal experiences to illustrate every major controversy in the healthcare fight. Starting with the emergency room, it guides readers through the modern hospital, examining individual cases to show larger truths. It chronicles lives saved, lives lost, and lives caught in the twilight world between the two. It shows how modern medicine is shaped by an anarchic array of forces, each with its own source, focus, and interests. Readers will learn how insurance, law, and DTC advertising have shaped our medical experience. They will see how technology combines with culture to create the false notion of a zero failure rate. Medical malpractice, regulatory boards, and excess testing are vividly described in stories showing real life consequences. Thorough description and argument are fine, but the true value of "We All Die Once? is in its solutions. All the firsthand accounts, arguments and history follow a logical course to proposals of sane, rational measures that balance imperfections with ideals. This isn't a panacea, nor is it stuck in socialistic or libertarian philosophies. It's a pragmatic way for healthcare to benefit from free market competition, allowing most of us to pay affordable prices for humane and personalized service. It retains a role for government in healthcare for the poor and needy, and returns insurance to its proper role of backup against catastrophe. It outlines roles for law and media which would protect both doctors and patients, while providing patients with accurate, objective information in an atmosphere free of high-pressure promotions. Recent healthcare bestsellers are narrowly-focused arguments about a single subject. Books like Betsy McCaughey's "Decoding the Obama Health Law: What You Need To Know," and "Why Obamacare Is Wrong for America" by Grace-Marie Turner et al, show their limitations in their titles and introductions. They are for or against one thing: the healthcare law of 2011. "We All Die Once" sees Obamacare as simply one more stage in the disintegration of American medicine. It looks at the whole field, from insurance to practice, from birth to death. It examines what we want medicine to be, and how we can work toward that goal. In the process it explodes many myths, and exposes extremists on all sides to harsh reality.Tea Party enthusiasts and supporters of Occupy Wall Street will love and hate this book, each for their own reasons. Legislators and policymakers will find a comprehensive tool with a complete program that avoids rigid doctrines. "We All Die Once" takes the impossible quandaries of healthcare, and subjects them to the art of the possible. Readers with an interest in medicine, economics, or public policy will find it's impossible to put this book down.
About the Author: Dr. Kessler was born in Brooklyn and grew up in NY. He graduated from the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine in 1990, and trained in emergency medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine Integrated Residency in Emergency Medicine in New York City, finishing his Chief Resident year in 1994. Over the past 24 years He has worked as a clinician, instructor and director in several emergency facilities, from small, under-equipped suburban hospitals to large state-of-the-art university facilities. Dr. Kessler is married to an emergency physician for 20 years. They have two children in their teens. In the months since beginning this project, both his mother and father-in-law died. In both instances he had up-close-and-personal experiences with our health system from various perspectives of physician and member of the patient's family. Those losses resonated with him making this book more vital than ever.