This book is an insightful examination of bioethics and American healthcare and their profound impact on American culture over the past sixty years by two distinguished scholars. An eye-opening look at the inevitable moral choices that accompany the tremendous advances in medicine, Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to
Die is an introduction for all Americans to be honest about healthcare. Dating back to the 1950s, when doctors still paid for home visits but regularly hid the truth from their patients, Amy Gutmann and Jonathan D. Moreno explore the unprecedented revolution in healthcare and explain the problem of America wanting everything medicine has to offer, with no debate about its merits or limitations. As a result, Americans today pay significantly more for healthcare, while having some of the lowest life expectancies and highest infant mortality rates of any wealthy country.
Reviews
"Gutmann and Moreno vividly explore the complexity of the ethical principles underlying scientific advances and new treatments... This valuable position, which is part cultural history, part philosophical inquiry and part gentle polemic, should become recommended reading for physicians in America. "
- Publishers' Weekly
"Amy Gutmann and Jonathan Moreno's groundbreaking book Everybody Wants to Go to Heaven But. Nobody Wants to Die should be a must-read for anyone with a heartbeat who wants to understand the ethical and practical contradictions of our cultural obsession with prolonging life at all costs ". - Andrea Mitchell, NBC News presenter
"Readable and understandable to the layperson, sophisticated and comprehensive for all, fair in approach but also taking positions, this book provides a thorough history, with important examples, of all areas of research and action that raise serious ethical questions. Everyone will face some of the challenges presented in this book. And reading it will be of great benefit to everyone ".
- Norman Ornstein, Research Resident at the American Enterprise Institute