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Wednesday, April 25th

HarperCollins

Price: $25.95

JONATHAN COHN discussing
Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis--and the People Who Pay the Price

Harvard Book Store is excited to welcome Jonathan Cohn to discuss his new book, Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis--and the People Who Pay the Price.

America's health care system is unraveling. Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families—unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans.

The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating. In Boston, a heart attack victim becomes a casualty of emergency room overcrowding when she is turned away from the one hospital that could treat her. In South Central L.A., a security guard loses part of his vision when he can't find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the middle of the prairie heartland, a retired meatpacker sells his house to pay for the medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. And, in a tiny village tucked into the Catskill mountains, a mother of three young children decides against a costly doctor's visit—and lets a deadly cancer go undetected—because her husband's high-tech job no longer provides health insurance.

Passionate, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick interweaves these stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington and takes us inside the medical industry to chronicle the decline of America's health care system—and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.

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Jonathan Cohn  is a senior editor at The New Republic, writing mainly about domestic politics and policy, with a particular focus on issues related to health care and social welfare. In 2002, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation awarded Cohn one of its media fellowships to study how America's system for financing medical care affects who gets care and who doesn't. The product of that fellowship is his new book, Sick. Prior to his editorship at The New Republic, Cohn worked at The American Prospect, where he remains a contributing editor. He has also written for the Boston Globe, Mother Jones, The New York Times, Slate, and The Washington Monthly.