His review of how our health-care system got this way is a depressing reminder of forces that have little to do with health care and nothing to do with health. How did hospitals become so dominant? How did the Depression lead to the spread of health insurance? How did World War II price controls help lock health insurance to employment? And what do tax breaks have to do with it?

Quick: Whats the biggest single tax break in the United States? Tax-free health benefits, nearly four times as large ($250 billion) as the mortgage interest deduction ($70 billion). With employers able to offer health insurance to employees free of tax, the benefits became an increasingly important part of pay over the years. Getting rid of that deduction, Emanuel makes clear, is one fix that he regrets was left out of the new health-care law.

Despite this and other critiques of the legislation, its clear that hes a wildly enthusiastic fan. Consider his view that beginning in 2020 or so, the ACA will increasingly be seen as a world historical achievement, even more important for the United States than Social Security and Medicare has been. And Barack Obama will be viewed more like Harry Truman judged with increasing respect over time. Wow. His logic is that by 2020, the law and its effects will arrest health-care inflation to simply match the rise in gross domestic product, instead of the recent rate of two percentage points above the annual increase that has rocketed costs to nearly 18percent of GDP today. That would indeed be a major accomplishment.

Emanuel is no dispassionate outsider. A professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, he was a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform and worked directly on the Affordable Care Act. He also peppers his story with accounts of expletive-laden exchanges with his brother Rahm, current mayor of Chicago and former Obama White House chief of staff.

In 2009 and 2010, Ezekiel Emanuel was labeled Dr. Death after Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, among others, twisted his medical ethics work to conclude that he favored withholding health care from the disabled and advocated death panels. Thats sheer nonsense.

Whether you agree with his conclusions or not, theyre well argued, and he has marshaled an impressive amount of information. Some of the simplest facts bear repeating. For example, how vulnerable every one of us was before passage of the health-care law: More than half of us got health insurance through our jobs. But three-quarters of the uninsured were in households with at least one paycheck, and nearly one in 10 uninsured households brought in more than $94,000 a year. It wasnt just money that kept some people from having health-care coverage, it was also access. For some, their jobs didnt provide insurance. And yet others were rejected, ironically, because they were too sick.

Emanuel also reminds us that there is much more to the Affordable Care Act than the troubled insurance exchanges. There are targets to induce hospitals to lower infection rates, incentives to adopt electronic medical records, rules for better pricing transparency (a current nightmare!) and more complete data on hospital safety and outcomes, and better access to free preventative services such as immunizations and mental health screenings.

Where Emanuel goes off the rails is in extrapolating from these provisions of the law a vastly different future. He posits the end not only of health-care inflation but also of medical insurance as we know it. He sees employers ceding their roles as providers of access to health care, technology replacing costly hospital stays and specialists, hospitals closing in large numbers, and the remaining ones becoming safer and more efficient.

Thats wishful thinking. His own very persuasive review of history shows how exterior forces and grabs for dollars have thwarted and distorted sensible plans.

Look at the advertising in the D.C. Metro opposing cuts to hospital funding to see how rocky the path to hospital closings will be. Check out the sad fate of a Maryland nonprofit start-up, the faltering Evergreen Health Co-op, for a view of how hard it will be to create alternatives to traditional care. Anyone who has ever been part of a technology changeover anywhere can imagine what it will take to link the whole messy U.S. health-care system electronically. And consider the travails of 23andMe, a genetics company whose medical service was shut down by the Food and Drug Administration, for an example of how difficult it will be for newcomers to break into spaces that others own.

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Book review: Reinventing American Health Care by Ezekiel Emanuel