The People’s Hospital: Hope and Peril in American Medicine

Why, in our country, do some people have no access to the medical care they need? asked Linda Villarosa in The New York Times. Ricardo Nuila, a Houston physician, has given much thought to that “simple but profound” question. “His answer is equally simple: Because the principal goal of the American health-care system is to make money.” Fortunately, Nuila is unusually well positioned to argue that things could be different. Besides being a skillful storyteller, he is a staff physician at Ben Taub Hospital, the publicly funded safety-net hospital that serves Houstonians who can’t afford to go anywhere else. With his first book, he proposes “what seems like an audacious idea: that Ben Taub should serve as a model for change.”

“Although data is very much present, the heart and soul of The People’s Hospital is the patients,” said Veronica Esposito in The Guardian. You’ll meet Stephen, the manager of a burger chain whose bare-bones insurance forced him to try Taub after a cancer diagnosis. You’ll also follow Roxana, a Salvadoran immigrant who entered

Taub after a previous hospital left her with gangrene in all four limbs. And Ebonie, a mother of seven whose latest pregnancy threatens her life. Nuila doesn’t suggest

Taub works miracles. But he does find much evidence that Taub often achieves better outcomes than the best private hospitals.

“How does Ben Taub do it?” asked Rachel Pearson in Texas Monthly. Patients sometimes do have to accept long waits for expensive diagnostic tests. But Nuila argues that such hurdles are often beneficial, eliminating many of the unnecessary tests and procedures that other hospitals perform because of a revenue incentive. Slash those costs and health care becomes far more affordable. Nuila seems to favor erasing the distortions of profit-taking by establishing a fully tax-funded health-care system. Until that happens, we should be wary of assuming that our safety-net hospitals are good enough to make systemic reform unnecessary. Still, Taub does excellent work, and Nuila “has every right to be proud of it.”