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AN INVITATION: Do you have a story to tell, as a dialysis patient, family member, advocate, dialysis worker, nephrologist, or other insider in the world of US dialysis? Please contact me at tom@tommueller.co [not .com] I guarantee complete confidentiality. After writing How to Make a Killing, a deep dive into the US dialysis industry, I want to hear your stories (as well as any comments and criticisms you may have of my book). Thank you!
Published August 1st, 2023: Order here
How did a lifesaving medical breakthrough become a for-profit enterprise that threatens the people it’s meant to save?
Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: a treatment that made kidney failure a manageable condition instead of a death sentence. And yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care.
A gripping microcosm of American health care gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s—when transplants and early dialysis machines offered hope—gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing (and profiting from) life-saving care. After Congress made renal disease the only “Medicare for All” condition, Big Dialysis proliferated, and the Hippocratic oath gave way to the profit motive.
A triumph of investigative research, Tom Mueller’s book features an unforgettable cast of characters: CEOs who dress as Musketeers to exhort more aggressive profit-seeking, nephrologist insiders who reveal the substandard care this causes, and heroic patients who risk their lives to reveal the truth.
Published October 1st, 2019: We live in a time of mind-boggling corruption. We also live in a golden age of whistleblowing. Over the past two decades, the brave insiders who act to expose wrongdoing have gained unprecedented legal and social stature, emerging as the government’s best weapon against corporate misconduct–and the citizenry’s best defense against government gone bad. Whistleblowers force us to confront fundamental questions about the balance between free speech and state secrecy, and between individual rights and corporate power.
In Crisis of Conscience, Tom Mueller traces the rise of whistleblowing through a series of riveting cases drawn from the worlds of Big Pharma and health care, the military, finance, and government. Drawing on in-depth interviews with more than two hundred whistleblowers and the trailblazing lawyers who arm them for battle–plus politicians, intelligence analysts, government watchdogs, cognitive scientists, and other experts–he anatomizes what inspires some to speak out while the rest of us avert our eyes. Whistleblowers, we come to see, are the freethinking citizens on whom our republic was conceived. And they are the models we must emulate if our democracy is to survive.
Praise for Crisis of Conscience.
Selected media on Crisis of Conscience.
For publicity requests, please contact:
Claire McGinnis
1745 Broadway, 21st Floor, NYC 10019
Tel: 212-366-2561
cmcginnis@penguinrandomhouse.com
A New York Times best-selling culinary, cultural and criminal history of olive oil, one of the world's most marvellous and murky substances.
Truth in Olive Oil: I recently, regretfully, wound up this website. For people searching for its resources, exposés, lists of great producers etc, everything can still be found at a number of snapshots on the magical Wayback Machine, eg here.
Extra Virginity has also been published in Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, German, Mandarin Chinese, and Finnish, and other languages are forthcoming.
How computer programs are changing chess. (Photo by Peter Rigaud.)
Read article here.
A comedian’s war on crooked politics. (Photo by Stefano Di Lorenzo.)
The dark world of the olive oil trade. (Art by Joost Swarte.)
King Tut's tomb was discovered 100 years ago -- and today Egypt opens a new billion-dollar museum fit for a pharaoh. Read articles here.
The illegal antiquities trade is booming, wreaking havoc on the world's archaeological heritage. Read article here. (Photo by Robert Clark.)
An Egyptian desert, once an ocean, holds the secret to one of evolution’s most remarkable transformations. Read article here. (Photo by Richard Barnes.)
The Holy Land's visionary builder. Read article here. (Photo by Michael Melford.)
Spinosaurus: Mr. Big
Move over, T. rex: The biggest, baddest carnivore to ever walk the Earth is SPINOSAURUS. Read article here. (Art by Davide Bonadonna, photos by Mike Hettwer.)
A near-perfect frozen mammoth resurfaces after 40,000 years, bearing clues to a great vanished species. Read article here. (Photo by Francis Latreille.)
How did a hot-tempered goldsmith with no formal architectural training create the most miraculous edifice of the Renaissance? Read article here. (Photo by Dave Yoder.)
The Delicate Balance of Portugal's first—and only—national park, a combination of natural wonders and local lifestyles. Read article here. (Photo by Peter Essick.)
What has fins like a whale, skin like a lizard, and eyes like a moth? The future of engineering. Read article here. (Photo by Robert Clark.)
Art theft in theory and practice. (Photo by Stefan Ruiz)
Below the high altar of St. Peter's, investigators have found sheep bones, ox bones, pig bones, and the complete skeleton of a mouse. Was Peter himself ever there? Read article here.
(Image credit: "Plan of the Necropolis" by digitalisiert von Mogadir - Pietro Zander; Fabbrica di San Pietro (Hrsg.): The Necropolis under St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.2010, ISBN 978-88-7369-081-8.. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.)
A good way to study ancient Rome is to explore the cellars -- and subcellars -- of modern Rome. Read article here.
Inside a lab in Pisa, forensics pathologist Gino Fornaciari and his team investigate 500-year-old cold cases. Read article here. (Photo by Dave Yoder.)
Heinz-Jürgen Beste decodes the labyrinth of passages, rooms and lifts beneath the floor ofthe Coliseum. Read article here. (Photo by Dave Yoder.)