Minda Wilson has spent more than 20 years on the frontlines of the healthcare debate. Wilson is not a politician or an insurance executive. She is a corporate attorney specializing in healthcare, paid to understand the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, its implementation, and its impact. What she’s learned is terrifying. She has the insight and expertise to say what no one else is saying, and is proposing real-world, implementable solutions.
In her new book Urgent Care, Wilson offers ten cures for America’s ailing healthcare system. The truth is, that in trying to ensure access to high quality, affordable healthcare for all Americans and improve the healthcare delivery records of underperforming hospitals, we have sacrificed many of the things that made America’s health system the greatest one in the world. What is the future of healthcare in America if we don’t change our current trajectory? Our current path leads to a future where fat, rich insurance companies continue to squeeze service providers and suppliers, where middle class people cannot afford to pay for care, and where the reality of doctors struggling pushes them to seek better opportunities outside of medicine.
Urgent Care examines where we are, how we got here, and the future of healthcare delivery if we do nothing. It speaks to a wide variety of issues including: Up to 95% of every dollar you spend on insurance goes to fund insurance company costs, not patient care; shouldn’t it be the opposite? This year, depending upon where you live, insurance companies are raising policy rates for families between 10% and 40%. While insurance companies are having record years and senior executives are getting record bonuses, healthcare suppliers and providers are being told they should not expect to receive any portion of this premium increase. How our current system will bankrupt our middle class. With insurance covering less and less, the cost of premiums escalating each year, and the cost of administering healthcare plans skyrocketing, why would any company continue to offer health insurance when the penalty under ACA guidelines to not do so is far less? Insurance models that work; catastrophic coverage for $5 a month with a $500 deductible—why is no one holding big insurer’s feet to the fire to match this? Solutions that address tax benefits, gifting programs, a realignment of Urgent Care Center function, medical services to incarcerated populations, as well as other programs and processes. How consumers can take back their power, and more. Healthcare in America can be fixed. In Urgent Care, combining healthcare law and practice with proven business strategies, and joining policy with the practical, Minda Wilson tells us how.
The Volkswagen diesel emissions test cheating scandal and its various offshoots have had a far-reaching impact on a wide range of parties. This impact has been financial, environmental, political, and regulatory. The parties affected include car owners, Volkswagen’s leadership team and employees, shareholders, car dealers, government officials, regulatory agencies, the media, the automotive industry, and even the Made-in-Germany brand. To date, Volkswagen has been assessed or agreed to over $24B in fines, penalties, and compensatory payments to car owners. One Volkswagen employee is serving an 18-month jail term in South Korea. Another is awaiting sentencing in the U.S. after a plea bargain arrangement. A third sits in a U.S. jail thousands of miles away from his home in Germany pending his own trial or plea bargain agreement. Five of their colleagues in Germany have been indicted on felony charges by a U.S. grand jury and have been warned not to leave the country.
The Volkswagen Saga is a story of deliberate corporate malfeasance that has impacted the automaker’s car brands, leadership structure, governance, corporate reputation, current and future financial results, and its corporate culture. It is a story full of leadership lessons on corporate governance, branding, crisis communications, corporate responsibility, and individual accountability relevant to leaders of any size organization.
Leadership Lessons from the Volkswagen Saga nails the teachings and learnings stemming from what is now the benchmark for corporate cheating and corporate scandals.
In late July 2011, Norway was struck by the worst terror attack in its history. I what can only be called a killing spree, Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people, bombing government building and an hour long shooting spree in a the island of Utøya. His actions were meant to mark the onset of an ethnic cleansing of Norway and Europe of Muslims, and the downfall of Europe's purportedly 'multiculturalist' elites.
Anders Breivik and the Rise of Islamaphobia reveals how Breivik's beliefs were not simply the result of a deranged mind, but rather are the result of the political mainstreaming of pernicious racist and Islamaphobic discourses. These ideas, currently gaining common currency in many countries, threaten equal rights to dignity, citizenship and democratic participation for minorities throughout contemporary Europe.
An authoritative account of the Norwegian terror attacks and the neo-racist discourse that motivated it.
The renowned blogger and Middle East expert Juan Cole illuminates the role of today’s Arab youth—who they are, what they want, and how they will affect world politics.
Beginning in January 2011, the revolutionary wave of demonstrations and protests, riots, and civil wars that comprised what many call “the Arab Spring” shook the world. These upheavals were spearheaded by youth movements, and yet the crucial role they played is relatively unknown. Middle East expert Juan Cole is here to share their stories.
For three decades, Cole has sought to put the relationship of the West and the Muslim world in historical context. In The New Arabs he outlines the history that led to the dramatic changes in the region, and explores how a new generation of men and women are using innovative notions of personal rights to challenge the authoritarianism, corruption, and stagnation that had afflicted their societies.
Not all big cohorts of teenagers and twenty-somethings necessarily produce movements centered on their identity as youth, with a generational set of organizations, symbols, and demands rooted at least partially in the distinctive problems besetting people of their age. The Arab Millennials did. And, in a provocative and optimistic argument about the future of the Arab world, The New Arabs shows just how they did it.
A searching and provocative examination of the widespread institutional rot that threatens our collective future
What causes rich countries to lose their way? Symptoms of decline are all around us today: slowing growth, crushing debts, increasing inequality, aging populations, antisocial behavior. But what exactly has gone wrong? The answer, Niall Ferguson argues in The Great Degeneration, is that our institutions—the intricate frameworks within which a society can flourish or fail—are degenerating. With characteristic verve and historical insight, Ferguson analyzes the causes of this stagnation and its profound consequences for the future of the West. The Great Degeneration is an incisive indictment of an era of negligence and complacency—and to arrest the breakdown of our civilization, Ferguson warns, will take heroic leadership and radical reform.
