Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at The New Republic magazine, proclaimed, “We [Americans] do have a dysfunctional health care system.” But he said, speaking to the Venice Family Clinic, “This place is fully functional.”
Cohn’s book, Sick: The Untold Story of America’s Health Care Crisis – And the People Who Pay the Price, was published by Harper Collins April 10. Shortly before the book’s release, he addressed a gathering assembled at the Venice Family Clinic’s Simms/Mann Health and Wellness Center on Pico Boulevard in Santa Monica. Cohn reviewed a “brief history” of health care and the means of paying for it in the United States from 1920 to the present, and then he proceeded to explain the reasons we will have universal health care by 2012…and the reasons we won’t have universal health care by that time.
Cohn is a senior fellow at the New York think tank Demos in addition to his position at The New Republic, where he has been writing and editing articles about national politics and its influence on American communities for the past decade. His book Sick, the product of original research and reporting that spanned five years, focuses on eight contemporary Americans struggling to find affordable medical care; into their stories, Cohn weaves the history of health insurance in America, which he briefly reviewed for his Venice Family Clinic audience.
