Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You [PDF, ePub, Mobi]

Dr. Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why?

To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market. Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.

"A startling revelation of the dysfunction deeply embedded in the very culture of American medical practice, problems that health care reform scarcely begins to address."
--Peter Boyer, senior correspondent for Newsweek

"A searing indictment from the inside, arguing that the modern health-care industry, unlike almost every other, doesn't disclose its performance or pricing practices to the public and keeps under wraps information about mistakes and substandard quality."
--Laura Landro, The Wall Street Journal

"This thought-provoking guide from a leader in the field is a must-read for M.D.s, and an eye-opener for the rest of us."
--Publishers Weekly

"A galvanizing book full of shocking truths about the current state of health care."
--Kirkus Reviews

Marty Makary, M.D., M.P.H. is a surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital and a professor of Health Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. He is a regular medical commentator for CNN and FOX News, and appears weekly on a wide variety of programs to discuss health topics. He is a leading patient-safety researcher and led the World Health Organization effort to develop ways to measure healthcare quality.

148 Reviews
5 star: (118)
4 star: (19)
3 star: (7)
2 star: (1)
1 star: (3)