A review by tortue_abroad
America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System by Steven Brill

3.0

Honestly more like 2.5 by the end. This book ended up being a slog to finish but I finally did it. I wanted to learn more about Obamacare and health care in the US in general to better understand the continued debate about it now and I did do that from parts of the book, but I think it could have been done much better. There are so many details in this book but when I felt like he had been talking too specifically about Washington and I wanted more of an outsider perspective, I found myself thinking ‘ok but not that one’ when he switched to a new perspective. He spent a lot (A LOT) of time talking about all the ways in the background that the website didn’t work, for instance, and this one new insurance company made by Jared Kushner. To be fair, he also explained a lot of what was broken about old health care plans and how their caps left people monetarily ruined, and a lot of time was spent on how prices are inflated. But it felt like the book was organized poorly so it was jumping around and when he got back to prices being inflated he had to give another example that was very much like the first just to show how pervasive the issue was. I got it; I agreed after the first few. So yeah, read selectively you can learn things that are useful, but it’s hard to avoid an avalanche of a lot of other stuff. Oh, also, he clearly had his own idea that he wanted health care to work and I get that anyone writing a book will have an opinion but I felt like he was beating me over the head with it. Especially at the end.