In 2003, economist Helene Jorgensen was bitten by a tick and thus began her new, unpaid, and full-time job—sojourner through the U.S. health care system. Her five-year odyssey reveals the many inefficiencies and irrationalities that both characterize the system and put lives at risk. In Sick and Tired, Jorgensen takes a closer look at the institutional failures at every stage of the health care system, including diagnosis, treatment, insurance, and prescriptions. Having surveyed those failures, she offers practical guidelines for their correction.
Helene Jorgensen is a senior research associate with the Center for Economic and Policy Research. She has also served as an advisor to the Census Bureau Advisory Committee on the Decennial Census and chaired the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Labor Research Advisory Subcommittee. She received her Ph.D. degree in Economics from American University, and has has written for the American Prospect, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Guardian about labor compensation, work hours, and health care issues. Sick and Tired is her first book. Jorgensen lives in Washington DC with her husband.
Praise
“Dr. Helene Jorgensen was unlucky enough to get sick, and she ended up getting a hairraising tour of the failures of the American health care delivery system. In response, she wrote a little book everyone who has a body and lives in America should read, complete with easy-to-understand lists like ‘How to Get Good Care at a Hospital.’”
—Jordan Fisher Smith, author of the Booksense bestseller Nature Noir
“Sick and Tired shatters the myth that America’s health care problem is a problem only of lack of insurance coverage. Jorgensen shows how the corporate insurance system denies rather than provides care, how drug companies and doctors drive up costs, and how for-profit hospitals put patients at risk. As Jorgensen makes achingly clear, the corporate-driven system capitalizes on patients’ vulnerability. Replacing the corporate health insurance industry with a Medicare for All system will not be a panacea, as Jorgensen notes, but it is a vital step to reconstructing a health care system organized around health promotion and care for patients, rather than corporate profits.”
—Robert Weissman, President, Public Citizen
Reviews
Publishers Weekly
February 1, 2010
★ Sick and Tired: How America’s Health Care System Fails Its Patients
Helene Jorgensen. PoliPoint (Ingram, dist.), $16.95 paper (224p) ISBN 9780982417119
With this guide to America’s health delivery system, complete with her been-there account of its failures, Jorgensen compiles thorough notes for navigating the foggy environs of health care providers and insurers. In 2003, three years into a six-year bout with Lyme disease, economist Jorgensen (Why Union Workers Deserve Their Pay) began documenting her dispiriting struggle to get treatment (though she was so ill she could barely write a daily entry). Over five years, Jorgensen paid $11,000 out-of-pocked (in addition to an annual $7,500 health insurance premium) seeking a correct diagnosis, but was stymied by human errors, complicated by bureaucratic intractability: because her first doctor had not ordered the right test, proper treatment was delayed eight months; because her disease lingered beyond the four week standard set by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, she had to find new doctors. (Jorgensen’s insurance paid $180,000, a fact that does not go unexplored.) Through her experience, Jorgensen has developed a practical and gripping guidebook to getting sick in America, organized usefully by the practitioners involved: insurers, doctors, hospitals, labs, drug-makers, and disease experts. Jorgensen concludes with a thoughtful chapter on reform, in which she looks to the Veterans Health Administration as a model of wise remuneration. (Feb.)