Code Blue

For the first time, Code Blue presents the dramatic story of how our Medical Industrial Complex was built, while exploring why Americans pay way more for healthcare than any developed country in the world—and get far worse results. Mike Magee’s narrative rivals the best of Michael Lewis in its clarity, authority, and compulsive readability. This is essential reading for every American concerned with his or her health and the health of the nation. Magee explains American healthcare’s original sin: when establishing our system, health and political leaders prioritized profit over good health results; cure over care; and quixotically conquering disease over improving the social, cultural, and environmental conditions that in huge ways determine the health of our citizenry. While we established our profit-first system for our citizens, our military designed single-payer systems focused on care, not cure, for our defeated enemies in World War II, Germany and Japan—the system we ought to have in the United States. Statistics are compelling; here are two: 1) American children are almost twice as likely to die in the first five years of life than British, German, Canadian, and Japanese children—all countries which have single payer, multi-plan systems. 2) The U.S. healthcare lobby is four times as large as that run by the U.S. defense industry. Mike Magee is a distinguished doctor, hospital administrator, and former executive of Pfizer. He has spent the last ten years unraveling how our healthcare system was built and the complexity of its operation. Code Blue is the remarkable culmination of that decade of research.