How to Make a Killing: Blood, Death and Dollars in American Medicine

Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: a treatment that made kidney failure a manageable condition instead of a death sentence. And yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care. A gripping microcosm of American health care gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s—when transplants and early dialysis machines offered hope—gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing (and profiting from) life-saving care. After Congress made renal disease the only “Medicare for All” condition, Big Dialysis proliferated, and the Hippocratic oath gave way to the profit motive. A triumph of investigative research, Tom Mueller’s book features an unforgettable cast of characters: CEOs who dress as Musketeers to exhort more aggressive profit-seeking, nephrologist insiders who reveal the substandard care this causes, and heroic patients who risk their lives to reveal the truth.

About the Author :
Tom Mueller’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, New York Times Magazine, and Atlantic. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling Extra Virginity about food fraud, and Crisis of Conscience on whistleblowers and their enemies.

Review :
We have accepted too much for too long. There are those who will say that the book exaggerates and that things he reports don't happen. Maybe they don't in some/most clinics, but even if they happen in a few clinics, we can do better.--Beth Witten "Home Dialysis Central" We urge you to stop what you're doing, buy this book, and read it from cover to cover. The book presents nothing short of an indictment of rabid capitalism run amok, effectively turning what should be a life-saving branch of medicine into a criminal enterprise.--Pam and Russ Martens "Wall Street on Parade" A terrifying story of profit before patients, and chilling glimpse of what can happen when private companies are allowed to take charge of healthcare.--Dr. Gavin Francis, author of Recovery Inspiring and deeply distressing. Mueller illustrates how modern medicine could devise technologies to literally revive people dying of kidney failure and how such miracles became perverted and incentivized abuses. A sad, shocking tale.--Ezekiel J. Emanuel, author of Which Country Has the World's Best Healthcare? I loved Tom Mueller's beautifully written and fascinating account of both the miraculous possibilities of medical technology and the perils of poorly structured markets. There is universal medical care in the United States, but only for kidney disease. How a program started by Richard Nixon and corrupted by finance has saved lives, and cost them, is the story of modern America.--Matt Stoller, author of Goliath: The 100-Year War between Monopoly Power and Democracy? New York Times best-selling author Tom Mueller very well could be rocking the foundations of many a corporate boardroom with this book.-- "Dialysis Ethics" Tom Mueller's How to Make a Killing is a rich and sweeping saga that is, sadly, a quintessentially American story: How a miracle medical machine transformed into profit machine, sick and suffering patients be damned.--Jesse Eisinger, author of The Chickenshit Club Tom Mueller goes deep, then wide, then straight for the jugular of the corporate predators who are getting rich by exploiting the poor and vulnerable. Anybody who can read How to Make a Killing without getting outraged must be unconscious. This book raised my blood pressure by at least thirty points.--Carl Elliott, author of White Coat, Black Hat and Better Than Well