How to Make a Killing

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.

About the Author

Tom Mueller's previous book with Norton, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, was a New York Times bestseller. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and the Atlantic, and is anthologized in The Best American Science and Nature Writing. He divides his time between the Pacific Northwest and Italy.