Six decades ago, researchers achieved the impossible: a treatment that made kidney failure a manageable condition instead of a death sentence. And yet, in the hands of a predatory medical industry, this triumph led to skyrocketing costs and worsening care. A gripping microcosm of American health care gone wrong, How to Make a Killing recounts how the optimism of the 1950s and 1960s-when transplants and early dialysis machines offered hope-gave way to anguished debates about the ethics of rationing (and profiting from) life-saving care. After Congress made renal disease the only "Medicare for All" condition, Big Dialysis proliferated, and the Hippocratic oath gave way to the profit motive.