Laser Burn: A Medical Thriller by One of Americas Prominent Surgeons

This fictionalized attack on health-care reform and on President Clinton is poorly written (``The two surgeons had a camaraderie that belied great mutual respect'') and ill-tempered (Clinton, here called simply ``the President,'' will ``continue the same vicious slash-and-burn attack on American medicine that he's been conducting all along''). It's also astonishingly ill-timed (``Health care reform was coming down America's Main Street like a steamroller, and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it.'') But it is, blessedly, short. Top orthopedic surgeon Jack Armstrong (shades of the All-American boy) has decided that managed-health care plans and the President's attempt at reform will make it impossible to continue his own pioneering arthroscopic surgical techniques in Texas, so he moves his family to Mexico. This unlikely plot turn quickly spins into downright preposterous developments that include murder, drug-running, an operation on the shoulder of the pilot of Air Force One and an attempt on the President's life that Armstrong foils in the nick of time. Even many of those who agree that health-care reform is a ``national hoax'' will want to perform their own slash-and-burn on this amateurish work, while others may note with raised eyebrows that most of first-novelist Burkhart's antireform pronouncements are mouthed by an M.D. who, before he performs all-day surgery, eats a breakfast consisting solely of... 20 vanilla wafers. (Jan.)