In this strident, necessary, meticulously researched book Michael Fine uses the COVID-19 pandemic and many other examples to show the costly failure of the American health care system in bold relief. Hospitals, insurance companies, Big Pharma, specialists, and even primary care doctors have all become tools of the new health profiteers. On Medicine as Colonialism shows how the American health care system cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world. Focusing on how health care profiteers co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid to extract resources from communities, this book reveals how medicine and health care have become tools of a new health colonialism, turning medicine on its head, so that individuals and communities lose their agency, health becomes impossible, and profits are used to dismantle democracy itself.
Praise
“Michael Fine is one of the true heroes of primary care over several decades.”
—Dr. Doug Henley, CEO and executive vice president of the American Academy of Family Physicians
“As Rhode Island’s director of health, Dr. Fine brought a vision of a humane, local, integrated health care system that focused as much on health as on disease and treatment.”
—US Senator Sheldon Whitehouse
“Michael Fine has given us an extraordinary biopic on health care in America based on the authority of his forty-year career as writer, community organizer, family physician, and public health official.”
—Fitzhugh Mullan, MD
About the Author
Michael Fine is a community organizer, family physician, public health official, and public health policy provocateur. He is the author of Health Care Revolt, Abundance, and The Bull and Other Stories.