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Monday, November 9, 2009 8:00pm Eastern over at FDL
Money-Driven Medicine
Chat with Robert Johnson, Executive Producer, and Maggie Mahar, Author, about the new film and her book. Hosted by Lisa Derrick.
Money-Driven Medicine provides the essential introduction Americans need to become knowledgeable participants in healthcare reform, now and in the years ahead. Produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room) and based on Maggie Mahar’s acclaimed book, Money Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much, the film offers a behind-the-scenes look at how our 2.6 trillion dollar a year healthcare system went so terribly wrong and what it will take to fix it.
The U.S. spends twice as much per person on healthcare as the average developed nation, fully one-sixth of our GDP – yet our outcomes, especially for chronic diseases, are very often worse. What makes us different? The U.S. is the only industrialized nation that has chosen to turn medicine into a largely unregulated, for-profit business.
ROBERT JOHNSON, PH.D., Co-Executive Producer
Dr. Robert Johnson serves on the boards of the Democracy Alliance, The Institute for America’s Future and the Brennan Center for Justice. Dr. Johnson is the former managing director at Soros Fund Management where he managed a global currency, bond and equity portfolio specializing in emerging markets. Before that, Johnson was a managing director of Bankers Trust Company and served as Chief Economist of the US Senate Banking Committee under the leadership of Chairman William Proxmire. He also served as Senior Economist of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee under the leadership of Chairman Pete Domenici. Dr Johnson holds a PhD. and M.A. in Economics from Princeton University and a B.S. in both Economics and Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MAGGIE MAHAR, Author
Maggie Mahar is the Healthcare Fellow at The Century Foundation where she writes the HealthBeat Blog, and the author of Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much. Before she began writing about healthcare, Mahar was a financial journalist and her first book Bull: A History of the Boom and Bust 1982-2003 was recommended by Warren Buffet in Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report. In an earlier career, Mahar was an English professor at Yale University where she taught 19th and early 20th century novels and poetry.
2 Comments
We all know the for profit healthcare is the problem, do they tell us how to make our Government know what we do?
Since it’s available for free, I watched the film. I think it has useful information about one of the biggest problems in the health care system today – namely overtreatment. It’s rather like Atul Gawande’s piece in the New Yorker set on camera. However, my impression is that it’s not as factually detailed as Gawande’s piece, which is not necessarily a criticism. It gets the basic message across and fortifies it with testimony from doctors and, often very emotionally, the patients.
But regardless of the documentary, my question is: why is the main author (Mahar) saying on her blog that the “public option” is “Medicare E (for everyone)”? This is simply a lie. In one article today she is quoted as saying that the progress the House has made on health care is “astounding.” That’s supported with false facts.