Books: Hospital: Man, Woman, Birth, Death, Infinity, Plus Red Tape, Bad Behavior, Money, God and Diversity on Steroids

A review of Julie Salamon’s book on our fragmented health care

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn seems to be in a constant state of chaos. Patients from across New York crowd the lobby at all hours, speaking dozens of languages. Administrators try to bring in as many paying patients as they can and then rush to discharge them as quickly as possible. (“It’s all about turnover,” one doctor admits.) Nurses struggle to find free beds. Egos clash over how to run a new multimillion-dollar cancer center. Doctors burn out from the frenetic pace and get sloppy, often forgetting to wash their hands.

Journalist Julie Salamon spent a year at Maimonides, and her finely observed book captures how medical care is—and isn’t—delivered at a large urban hospital. Amid poignant vignettes of doctoring on the fly, Salamon analyzes the “market ethos” that prevails even at a nonprofit hospital like Maimonides. The doctors she meets spend as much time haggling over reimbursements as they do delivering care. Efficiency—getting patients out the door, rather than letting them fully recover—is prized above all. As one administrator sums up the system, “You treat a patient for pneumonia, and they go home and have a horrible course. They get readmitted, but the patients survive, so the mortality figures don’t look that bad.”

Yet Hospital explores only some of the pressures that our fragmented health care system places on urban hospitals. New York City medical centers are pursuing ways to dissuade the swelling ranks of the uninsured from showing up at their doorsteps; the Wall Street Journal has reported that financial strains are forcing hospitals to ration care. Salamon barely touches on these topics. She seems to prefer the vantage point of the doc who tells her, “You have to focus on the individual patient. You get involved with these larger social issues, and you can’t.” That focus makes sense for an overworked physician—less so for a book on the health care system.


If you buy a book using a Bookshop link on this page, a small share of the proceeds supports our journalism.

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate