Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis and the People Who Pay the Price (Jonathan Cohn) makes a plea for a universal coverage with a single-payer system regulated by the government. Drawing on research and riveting anecdotes, the author describes how private insurers decide who and what they will (and will not) cover. The author argues that Medicare and universal health care in other countries (even though not perfect) are far superior to the system most Americans face. Readers of this book comment that it can’t be recommended highly enough.The Truth About health Care: Why Reform is Not Working in America (Critical Issues in Health and Medicine) (David Mechanic) explains how health care has evolved in ways that favor economic, professional, and political interests over those of patients. He also acknowledges that railing against these influences can achieve only so much. Instead, he suggests changes that may make it possible to convert what is best about health care in America into a well-functioning system that better serves the entire population.Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21^st Century (Committee on Quality of Health care in America and Institute of Medicine) presents the committee’s strong findings and bold vision in an effort to give new momentum to the processes of change in American health care.Your Doctor is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Health Care (Dr. Jane M. Orient) makes the case for freedom of enterprise and inquiry in medicine–a system under which the “heart of medicine is the relationship of one doctor to one patient.” Orient believes that the medical profession is already over-administered and controlled and she predicts an even further enslavement of physicians should a nationalized system emerge. Her descriptions of the British and German models of socialized medicine (both of which permit private insurance and private medicine) and the Canadian system are used to point out the flaws in state-run medicine.