The Hippocratic Myth: Why Doctors Have to Ration Care, Practice Politics, and Compromise Their Promise to Heal

When we’re ill, we place our trust in doctors who promise to place our well-being first and pledge to do us no harm. But medicine’s expanding capabilities and soaring expenditure threaten to make this commitment obsolete. Increasingly, warns Gregg Bloche, society is calling upon physicians to allocation care and to place their skills to use on behalf of insurance companies, sickbay bureaucrats, government officials, and courts of law. Doctors have increasingly answered this call, putting patient trust and health at risk, even as endangering citizens’ liberty and privacy.

In this book, Dr. Bloche evocatively communicates the tensions and emotions of doctors and patients as he takes on a wide variety of complex ethical situations, including how:
• doctors have double agendas, as caregivers and arbiters of
   cost, compromising their ability to prioritize patient needs
• medicine has become a weapon in America’s internal fight
   over such matters as abortion, helped suicide, and the
   rights of gays and lesbians
• doctors choose, below pressure from insurers and sickbay
   administrators, to discontinue potentially life-saving
   treatment, even when patients and family members object.