On Medicine as Colonialism

Book excerpt: In this strident, necessary, meticulously researched book Michael Fine uses the COVID-19 pandemic and many other examples to show the costly failure of the American health care system in bold relief. Hospitals, insurance companies, Big Pharma, specialists, and even primary care doctors have all become tools of the new health profiteers. On Medicine as Colonialism shows how the American health care system cannibalizes communities in the US and around the world. Focusing on how health care profiteers co-opt the state’s regulatory power, Medicare, and Medicaid to extract resources from communities, this book reveals how medicine and health care have become tools of a new health colonialism, turning medicine on its head, so that individuals and communities lose their agency, health becomes impossible, and profits are used to dismantle democracy itself.