Author Series: "America's Wrong Turn" with John E. McDonough In-Person
Please join Countway Library and the HMS Center for Bioethics for an Author Series event with John E McDonough about his new book: America's Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era.
About the Book 
How forty years of neoliberal policy choices created an American health care system that prioritizes profit over people.
How can a nation with unmatched wealth and medical innovation also have the highest health care costs and the poorest health outcomes among its peers? In America's Wrong Turn, John E. McDonough offers a compelling explanation for this troubling puzzle of contemporary US life and shows that this reality did not arise by accident.
"Not since Paul Starr's Social Transformation of American Medicine has a book provided such historically sweeping insight into US healthcare's political-economic foundations. Through the lens of the neoliberal revolution, McDonough offers a fresh perspective on the American health system's crises in costs, access, and population health." -Austin Frakt, PhD. Vice President and Chief Research Officer, Joint Commission
About the Author
John E. McDonough is a professor of practice at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health. Between 2008 and 2010, he was Senior Advisor on National Health Reform in the US Senate where he worked on writing and passing the Affordable Care Act. Between 2003-2008, he was Executive Director of Health Care For All, Massachusetts’ consumer health organization . From 1985 to 1997, he was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives He holds a doctorate in public health from the University of Michigan and a master’s in public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard. His new book: America’s Wrong Turn: US Healthcare in the Neoliberal Era, was published in 2026 by Johns Hopkins University Press.
