This coming Friday, November 20, starting at noon Eastern time, Firedoglake’s Book Salon will feature Maggie Mahar talking about her book, Money-Driven Medicine, The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much.

Maggie Mahar edits the blog Health Beat and has written extensively on health reform efforts. She was a financial writer and editor at Barron’s from 1986 to 1997 when she began writing about the health industry. As she told Bill Moyers for a recent interivew:

What I learned, during those years, is that in our health care system, profits often trump patients. A great many people are selling and selling hard. By law, for-profit corporations are supposed to put their shareholders’ interests first: this means that they must strive to maximize profits. And this goes a long way toward explaining why U.S. healthcare is so expensive.

In 2003, I began writing MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE: THE REAL REASON HEALTH CARE COSTS SO MUCH. (Harper/Collins, 2006) At the time, I believed that when President Bush left office, the country would be ready for a political pendulum swing—and health-care reform would, once again, become a possibility. (Admittedly, I didn’t foresee that Bush would be re-elected. The book was early.)

Maybe early, but the book couldn’t be more timely today, as the Senate is about to begin debate on its health reform bill, while think tanks, health blogs and pundits have been focused on whether the House or Senate bills will sufficiently deal with exploding health care costs. You can’t solve that unless you understand what’s driving costs. Mahar’s analysis and inights show we may be barely scratching the surface of this complex puzzle.

Now the themes in Mahar’s book have been captured in a terrific documentary film under the same title, MONEY-DRIVEN MEDICINE: THE REAL REASON HEALTH CARE COSTS SO MUCH, produced by Academy Award winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side; Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room). The film was broadcaust on Bill Moyers’ Journal on August 28, 2009 and is available for community groups during November as part a national "Watch in! For America’s Health."

You can WATCH THE FILM HERE. It’s extremely well done and worth watching, but at 86 minutes, you’ll want to do so before the Salon on Friday.

Moyer’s site also includes a transcipt here. Another Moyer’s link includes two links to a Q&A session with Mahar. If you haven’t already purchased the book, it’s available here.

I hope you’ll join us at the FDL Book Salon, this Friday, at noon Eastern.