A Poetic Review of Health Reform Books

Reviewers are usually people who would have been poets if they could.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1732-1834), Lectures on Shaespeare and Milton (1811-1812)

These days I find myself getting a bit too bleary-eyed,
Reviewing health reform books to see insight they provide.
I go from right to left,
From cleft, to deft, to heft.
I strive for middle ground,
But little of that is around.

In my own two books, Obama, Doctors, and Health Reform, and The Health Reform Maze,
On implications for physicians I graze,
With seldom a word of outright praise,
And with too much talk of doctor malaise.

On McDonough’s Inside National Health Reform,
A Democratic Insider’s view of the reform storm.
McDonough does his level best to deeply inform,
What went on to bring reform to its present form.

In the book Why Obamacare is Wrong for America,
Four conservative authors have a touch of sciatica.
They present multiple rational reasons numerica,
They say the health law is simply too esoterica,
To work in pragmatic, center-right America.

Then there are two books by two former Canadians
They claim the Canadian system is not for humanitarians.
Of Canada care, The Truth about Obamacare, Sally Pipes speaks for libertarians.
Dr. Kurisoco in Health Reform: End of American Revolution, represents utilitarians.

George Halvorson, CEO of Kaiser, in his two books Health Reform Now!
,Health Care Will Not Reform Itself.
Maintains we have to get off our collective shelf,
Facethe hard facts of system thinkers like himself,
And putaside economic incentives to save ourself.

Finally there’s my favorite, Paul Starr’s Remedy and Reaction
Which eloquently explains our political action and inaction,
Why America is so “peculiar” in its continued fraction,
And why we are so partisan in our complex interaction.

Facts on books on health reform (prices from Amazon)

1. The Health Reform Maze: A Blueprint for Physician Practices, by Richard L. Reece, MD., Greenbranch Publishing, 2011, 290 pages, $48.50

2. Obama, Doctors, and Health Reform: The Health System, from Top-Down to Bottom-Up, by Richard L. Reece, MD, IUniverse, 2009, 291 pages, $17.12

3. Inside National Health Reform, John E. McDonough, University of California Press, 2011, 339 pages, $22.30

4. Why Obamacare Is Wrong for America, by Grace-Marie Turner, James Capretta, Thomas Miller, Robert Moffitt, Broadside Books, 2011, 259 pages, $10.19

5. The Truth about Obamacare, by Sally Pipes, Regnery Publishing Inc., 2011, 276 pages, $6.78 (e-book $8.75)

6. Health Reform: The End of the American Revolution, by Lee Kurisko, MD, Alethos Press, 2009, 238 pages. $19.97 (e-book, $9.97)

7. Health Reform Now! A Prescription for Change, by George C. Halvorsan, John Wiley and Sons, 2007, 360 pages, $16.44

8. Health Care Will Not Reform Itself: A User’s Guide to Refocusing and Reforming American Health Care, by George C. Halvorsan CRC Press, 2009, 157 pages, $20.22

9. Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar Amerian Struggle over Health Vare Reform, Yale University Press, 2011. 324 pages, $17.46

Tweet: According to these nine reform books, there are nine and sixty ways to fix the system, and every single one is right.