The Hospital: Life, Death, and Dollars in a Small American Town

by Brian Alexander

So Ennen understood the small-town way of simultaneously demanding community respect from outsiders while internally scoffing at any homegrown institution as second-rate. He steamed just the same.

The idea of American failure was no more acceptable than the idea of God failing. The only explanation had to be personal sin.

What America did have was a jumble of ill-fitting building blocks: the doctoring industry, the hospital industry, the insurance industry, the drug industry, the device industry. They’d all been able to tweak and sand the corners of proposed “solutions” to benefit themselves. Lobbyists and political action committees spent millions to do so until the edifice of American medicine looked like a fragile Tower of Babel, rotten with holes and the crooked passageways where money was hidden. There was so much money. Trillions. And there was so much incentive to embrace the insanity because the insanity was so lucrative.

The country had changed from being an ongoing project to improve democratic society and live humanistic ideals to being a framework for fostering corporate profit.