Book review: reinventing American health care by Ezekiel J. Emanuel

In March 2010, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. It was the most extensive reform of America’s health care system since at least the creation of Medicare in 1965, and maybe ever. In this book, Ezekiel J. Emanuel details why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own–quite distinct–American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years. Edward Larkin suspects that Emanuel’s motive for writing a detail-heavy, wonkish tome is to provide an excellent contrast to bellicose Republican rhetoric about the socialization of American medicine.