The Great White Lie: Dishonesty, Waste, and Incompetence in the Medical Community

by Walt Bogdanich

A journalist offers a frightening portrayal of American hospitals, revealing tales of critical nursing shortages, botched surgeries, false billings, forced labor, bureaucratic incompetence, and inadequate care

Genres: Nonfiction, Medicine

320 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 1991

Reviews

[EstelleLiterature · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book on sociology that I read recently portrays how hospitals, not just in America but also in France, have shifted their time and energy and focus, by turning their their Intensive Care Units into Intensive Billing Units; how insurance companies have turned the primary care physicians into selling points of medicines produced by pharmaceuticals under their holding companies; how their bonded labor forces doctors, nurses, and orderlies to jump out of hospitals' top floors to escape the system's grind. This book also resonates with that American doctor who prescribed 'preventive' chemotherapy to healthy patients and then lost his medical license and earned a lifetime sentence in an American prison.

[Mayrald · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's nice to know the secrets that lies beyond the rooms and buildings of the hospitals. There are just topics that I am not quite interested.

[PJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the cover: The Great White Lie is destined to become a powerful rallying cry for the reform of our hospitals as well as the American health care system.

This book is so true! It was published in 1991. I left the rat race in 1998. It has only gotten worse.

[Deborah Gaspar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting about health care and what is real or not. Pertinent to the 1990's.