I remember National Health Care being a hot topic of discussion at parties of recent graduates of Harvard in the early 1960s and here we are in 2012 and NPR morning news woke me this morning, still talking about the House trying to reverse President Obama’s National Health Care Bill for the 30th time. This is the one that has just been declared legal by the Supreme Court. The book The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett is the story of the Health Care System in the United States and its cost for one couple as they move from state to state and different health care insurers for her career as a newspaper reporter and editor. I found her research into what she heard from doctors as a patient’s wife about her husband’s condition and what she learned as an investigative reporter about the condition fascinating. The different doctors’ discussions and conclusions for lab reports, that the patient never sees, gave a whole new light on the discussions with our doctors that we often think of as the definitive facts.
We have bought about fifteen books on the topic of National Health Care recently, some just the facts, some opinions from both sides of the debate. If you want to learn more about it, read one of them such as: Remedy and Reaction: the peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform, or Health Care Reform Simplified or Health Care Reform : What it is, why it’s necessary, how it works by Jonathan Gruber.
Phyllis Rogan, Reference Librarian
Steele Memorial Library