Six decades ago visionary doctors achieved the impossible: the humble kidney acknowledged
since ancient times to be as essential to life as the heart became the first human organ to be
successfully replaced with a machine. Yet huge dialysis corporations ambitious
doctor-entrepreneurs and Beltway lobbyists soon turned this medical miracle into an early
experiment in for-profit medicine-and one of the nation's worst healthcare catastrophes. With
powerful insight and on-the-ground reporting New York Times best-selling author Tom Mueller
introduces an unforgettable cast of characters. Heroic patients including a Hollywood stuntman
and body double risk their lives to blow the whistle on how they've been mistreated. An unpaid
activist living in a south Georgia trailer park fights to save patients from involuntary
discharge from their lifesaving care. Industry insiders put their careers on the line to speak
out about the endemic wrongs and pervasive inequality they've witnessed-and about dialysis
executives who dress as musketeers and Star Wars characters to exhort their employees to more
aggressive profit-seeking. Mueller evokes the scientific ingenuity and optimism of the 1950s
and 1960s when the burgeoning field of organ transplant and early dialysis machines offered
long-awaited hope for lifesaving care. That is until a New York salesman had himself dialyzed
on the floor of the House and Congress made renal disease the only "Medicare for All"
condition-opening the financial floodgates for Big Dialysis. Of the thousands caught in a web
of corporate greed a disproportionate number are Black and Latino highlighting the stark
racial divides already endemic to American medicine. How to Make a Killing reveals dialysis
as a microcosm of American medicine and poses a vital challenge: find a way to fix dialysis
and we'll have a fighting chance of fixing our country's dysfunctional healthcare system as a
whole restoring patients not profits as its true purpose.
