Going to be a review in the Feathered Quill...sending it out today. The book is quite good, although it could be a bit more organized...Nuila writes about his experiences, his patients' experiences, his family life, and his disdain for Medicine Inc., and sometimes the material trips over itself a bit. But, the stories are quite compelling...and we indeed have multiple issues surrounding healthcare in America....he proves that quite well.

DOUG

Firstly, thank you NetGalley for gifting me this for an advanced reading!

As a dentist who works in a rural community health center and who is also living in a Republican state, this book spoke to so many experiences I've had. The stories included are both inspiring and realistic; each patient description is gut wrenching, complex, and true to life. My favorite parts of the book are the author's descriptions of how the failures in America's insurance system leads to burn out and shortage of healthcare personnel.

My biggest criticism is that I think this book suffers from a lack of editing. There are parts in the first half of the book that feel disorganized and, at times, disconnected. It jumps from story to story often, and I found myself trying to understand how each story fit into the subject of the chapter I was on. While I do think that the last third of the book makes it a worthwhile read, I also kept going because I was given this as an ARC. I might have put it down and not returned to it otherwise.

Unlike the author, I grew up with government insurance and used "safety net" options in healthcare. While I think some of the book's strongest points are when the author describes his passion in caring for his patients, another criticism I have is that I wish he had stated more outright how privileged he was to be standing on the other side of the system as the son of a doctor and the one giving the care rather than needing the care.

There were times when I was unsure who the audience for this book was meant to be and whether the general public would have anything to gain from reading this. From the author's tone, it seemed to me that he was often describing his shock in how many people experience such difficult situations in healthcare. But for the majority of Americans, this is just a fact of life. This book seems more like a call to action for hospital administration and government officials who are disconnected from the day-to-day realities of healthcare than for the average person and consumer.

Overall, I'm glad that I read it. I would say that this is more of a 3,5 star read than a 4 star, but I'm rounding up because I think it would be a worthwhile read for the right person.

The People's Hospital balances telling what's wrong with our healthcare system while telling the stories of patients in a sensitive way. As someone who knew little about Ben Taub hospital, it was very interesting to hear Ricardo Nuila's perspective about it. Overall I was really impressed that this was Nuila's debut book, the writing style really reminded me of Evicted by Matthew Desmond. Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for this review copy.

After reading the book: IF I Betray These Words about moral injury that doctors face, it was time to read something hopeful in healthcare.
The author, who is a doctor, wrote this book to describe how messed the American Healthcare system is.

I applauded his efforts to humanize the faces of what healthcare for all could be like. I also appreciated his delivery of why things were so bad in healthcare.

One of the downsides was that I really got involved in the patients lives that he chronicled. I needed to know what happened to Ebonie's premature baby.
What happened to Steve? Did his tonsil cancer come back?

Overall its a great book to see how health care CAN and more importantly SHOULD be run.

Anyone who is interested in healthcare in America should read this book.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for this review copy.
I love medical memoirs, and I was really looking forward to this. It didn't meet my expectations--it blew them away. This is a medical memoir. Sensitively told stories of patients. AND an amazing examination of American medicine, what has gone wrong, and some ideas on how to fix it. All told with patience and empathy. This book is constructed beautifully and is already on my top ten list for 2023. Just such a good book. I love that there are institutions like Ben Taub in Houston and I just wish all Americans had access to something like this, and I think Dr. Nuila's ideas can be used to help the spiraling costs of medical care while improving it at the same time. Highly recommended.

My completed reveiw can be found here. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5201234837. This was an excellent book that would make for lively discussion in a book club.

I felt that this book shed some light on our broken health care system and ways that the Ben Taub hospital has found to work around this. I truly appreciated the unique perspective that this physician provides and that he has done a lot of research to be able to demonstrate the statistics and data as well. Thanks for the ARC, NetGalley.

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC. This book is long, but worth it. As someone who works in healthcare/ patient care this book gives me much hope for the future of our VERY broken healthcare system..

This was eye-opening. I've wanted to learn more about the iniquities in healthcare for a while now, and have found the explanations lacking until this book. It details the actual unfairness of it all and how and why so many people are left behind. It's even more astonishing that in one of the wealthiest countries, the smallest details can literally mean life or death for millions. Poverty will never end, and it seems like the US is intent on keeping it that way. Read this book, meet the real people in it, and then decide for yourself what you actually feel is the right thing to do.

I work in healthcare in Houston, so reading this was a very personal experience for me. The way Dr. Nuila describes the system that patients in Ben Taub hospital must navigate while all being significantly and chronically ill is what I see on a daily basis in a similar hospital in the Houston suburbs. My hospital also being a safety-net hospital for the area, really allowed me to make appropriate parallels to the stories of these patients. This book should be required reading for residents who will be working in hospitals such as Ben Taub, not only does it do a delicate job of explaining how the system works, but it gives careful, and thoughtful consideration to the needs of the patients, the government and how things got to where they are. The writing is appropriate for people who have no medical background, or who have only stepped foot in a hospital for births, or broken bones. The ability to explain in such detail while also keeping in mind that most people don't understand medical terminology, diagnosis, or lab results is a gift not many physicians have. I will be recommending this book to the physicians I work with. This is the most personable story of a physician in a broken system that I have ever read. Thank you to Dr. Nuila for the opportunity to learn.

This was a fascinating story and premise and I'll be thinking about it for a long time. It felt hopeful that there's an actual hospital putting a vision into practice and showing that it's possible to fix our very broken healthcare system. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC!