Colleagues at work recommends An American Sickness to all new hires as a primer on the current state of the health care industry and the market failures that plague the sector and are largely still waiting on legislative or regulatory solutions. As a software engineer, I’m not directly involved with the administrative rule-making process, but as a newcomer to health care, quickly building up domain knowledge is key to effectively sussing out the business value judgments embedded in software priorities and technical compliance requirements.

What I found particularly fascinating about Rosenthal’s assessment of the health care industry is the amount of culpability for the current state of affairs that she assigns to hospitals and large medical provider organizations. Public discourse on health care policy tends to identify insurance and pharmaceutical manufacturers as the villains of the story, but Rosenthal dispassionately and decisively demonstrates how the perverse incentives created by the fee-for-service have directly led to the explosive growth of administrative overhead and the systematic overtreatment of patients.

Highly recommended for those new to the field or for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of how and why American health care delivery costs have spiralled out of control.