by Steven Brill
4 Background of Delos “Toby” Cosgrove, the CEO of the Cleveland Clinic: Cosgrove, and the Cleveland Clinic website: http://my.clevelandclinic.org/staff_directory/staff_display?DoctorID=237.
5 For example, the lowest-salaried doctor: Salaries provided by spokespeople for both UPMC and New York–Presbyterian.
6 Before cardiothoracic surgeon Leonard Girardi operated on me I was able to check him out: Available through the New York State Department of Health website: https://www.health.ny.gov/statistics/diseases/cardiovascular/.
7 Louisville’s Jewish Hospital and St. Mary’s HealthCare: For state and national ratings, see this State of Kentucky “Quality Indicator”: https://prd.chfs.ky.gov/MONAHRQ/2012/MONAHRQ/qual/cls/pub/T_F_B.html?type=0&topic=F&tab=0&hosps=21051001. For information regarding the hospital’s reputation, see the U.S. News & World Report rankings here: http://health.usnews.com/best-hospitals/area/ky/jewish-hospital-6510510/cardiology-and-heart-surgery. (Note that I use the U.S. News report as a measure of reputation, not actual quality.)
8 We already spend 50 to 100 percent more as a portion of our gross domestic product: The OECD studies cited above, which include a comprehensive chart of gross domestic product percentages, can be found here: http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/health-data.htm.
ALSO BY STEVEN BRILL
The Teamsters
After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era
Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEVEN BRILL has been a journalist and media entrepreneur for more than thirty years. He founded and ran Court TV, The American Lawyer magazine, ten regional legal newspapers, and Brill’s Content magazine. He also co-founded Press+, which has enabled hundreds of newspapers and magazines around the world to charge modest subscription fees for their digital content.
A graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School, he has written for The New Yorker, Time, Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, and Esquire, among other magazines and news sites.
Brill was the author of Time’s March 4, 2013, Special Report “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” for which he won the 2014 National Magazine Award for Public Interest.
He is the author of three books: The Teamsters; After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era; and Class Warfare: Inside the Fight to Fix America’s Schools.
Brill also teaches journalism at Yale, where he founded the Yale Journalism Initiative to encourage and enable talented young people to become journalists. The Initiative has trained and motivated more than one hundred Yale Journalism Scholars, who are employed at some of the world’s most prestigious news organizations.
He is married, with three adult children, and lives in New York.