With his first book, The People’s Hospital, author Ricardo Nuila offers a compelling mixture of healthcare policy and gripping stories from the frontlines of medicine. Exploring the question of how Houston’s safety-net hospital, Ben Taub, can have better outcomes by many measures than America’s best private health centers, he deconstructs basic assumptions about healthcare in the US, pulling these ideas from vivid, journalistic accounts of the patients he serves.
Nuila took a twisty path to his literary vocation. Born into a family of doctors, he always felt the expectation that one day he’d become a doctor too. “I grew up visiting hospitals with my dad. I loved the feeling of being in a place where there was all this activity, and people were being helped.” Nuila’s father, originally from El Salvador, had worked extremely hard to carve out a profitable private practice in Texas, and his grandfather had also became a doctor, returning to El Salvador to serve his home community.
