Yet another book about the healthcare “system” everyone loves to hate? Yes, indeed, but this is a good one. Journalist Shannon Brownlee systematically documents the problems of health care in America, deftly mixing statistics with telling anecdotes and quotations. Along the way she also profiles healthcare heroes and villains at greater length.

If you ask doctors why health care costs so much in the United States, we’ll tell you that it is the for-profit medical system and litigious lawyers that are the problem. Drugs cost too much because of the rapacious drug companies. Administrative costs are too high and are multiplied by the vast number of health plans and insurance companies. And because we’re worried about lawsuits, we practise defensive medicine and order too many tests so we don’t miss anything.

Brownlee enumerates and rejects most of these explanations. She uses overtreatment as her organising principle and the …