Reddit reviews America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System

Put simply, with Obamacare we’ve changed the rules related to who pays for what, but we haven’t done much to change the prices we pay. When you follow the money, you see the choices we’ve made, knowingly or unknowingly.
Over the past few decades, we’ve enriched the labs, drug companies, medical device makers, hospital administrators and purveyors of CT scans, MRIs, canes and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, we’ve squeezed the doctors who don’t own their own clinics, don’t work as drug or device consultants or don’t otherwise game a system that is so gameable. And of course, we’ve squeezed everyone outside the system who gets stuck with the bills. We’ve created a secure, prosperous island in an economy that is suffering under the weight of the riches those on the island extract. And we’ve allowed those on the island and their lobbyists and allies to control the debate, diverting us from what Gerard Anderson, a health care economist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says is the obvious and only issue: “All the prices are too damn high.”

• Steven Brill, excerpt from "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us"
  
  Great book about it as well.

A big driver of the clusterfuck is 50 different standards because "muh states rights". I recommend Steven Brill's America's Bitter Pill if you're interested in learning more, but prepare to be infuriated.

You may want to check out "Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care: The Inside Story of a Century-Long Battle" for a book that's specifically focused on the policy history of universal healthcare in America.

http://www.amazon.com/Power-Politics-Universal-Health-Care/dp/1616144564/ref=pd_sim_14_15?ie=UTF8&dpID=51CsYFn-XEL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR104%2C160_&refRID=1RQEWFDZDX8NWF0Z57ZK

Less focused on universal healthcare, but apparently quite good, is Steven Brill's "America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System." Brill is an investigative journalist, and this book focuses more generally on the inefficiencies of the current healthcare system.

http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Bitter-Pill-Politics-Healthcare/dp/0812986687/ref=pd_sim_14_9?ie=UTF8&dpID=51uH46vVCTL&dpSrc=sims&preST=_AC_UL160_SR104%2C160_&refRID=1X5JG9768071Y4Y0JAAK

Again, not really focused entirely on universal healthcare, but an MIT economist put together a great comic about modern health care policy in American which might help provide a really good basic understanding of the issues surround universal healthcare.

http://slice.mit.edu/2012/02/28/in-a-comic-book-health-care-reform-explained/

I searched for "Steven Brill" "Bitter Pill" and found this pdf which I think may be the first article he wrote for Time.

Edit: the link is https://www.uta.edu/faculty/story/2311/Misc/2013,2,26,MedicalCostsDemandAndGreed.pdf

He did a follow up article and a book which goes into great detail of the whole process by which we got the ACA. Here's the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Bitter-Pill-Politics-Healthcare/dp/0812986687

As someone who is fighting for single-payer and researching how best to achieve it in America, I HIGHLY recommend listening to this interview with Steven Brill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_A5OkvPjW0w. Steven Brill is the Author of the book, America's Bitter Pill: http://www.amazon.com/Americas-Bitter-Pill-Politics-Healthcare/dp/0812986687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451210689&sr=8-1&keywords=steven+brill.

https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Bitter-Pill-Politics-Healthcare/dp/0812986687

Probably one of the better investigatory pieces written about the pre-ACA distribution problems in healthcare delivery.

Attul Gawande is another good author on the subject.

Google gives me this: https://www.amazon.com/Americas-Bitter-Pill-Politics-Healthcare/dp/0812986687/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1474208034&sr=8-1&keywords=america%27s+bitter+pill

and this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/034580273X/ref=pd_cp_14_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=NDKFN5HYEA1W4EBTVRNH

While they do talk about obamacare, they don't look like particularly partisan books, at least at first glance.