The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get OutHarvard University Press, 2005 M09 6 - 307 pages If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations. |
From inside the book
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... shaped medical practice and medical care. The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care. (continued on back flap) THE HEALTH CARE MESS This One W7XU - 9KP -
... delivery failures of the American health care system . The same newspapers that report the latest laboratory and clinical findings and hold out hope for new and more effective therapies also tell us about a dysfunctional insur- ance ...
... delivery of health care . These changes have altered the environ- ment in which health professionals are educated and medicine is prac- ticed . In earlier periods when medicine was expanding its ability to help individuals in distress ...
... delivery and financing systems are " our " systems ; American institutions of medical education are " our " institutions . Medicine is not an abstraction ; it is rooted in time and place . Our medical schools reflect our higher ...
... delivery because of our conviction that health and health care are vitally important in influencing life's chances and that one's income and wealth should not determine the amount and qual- ity of care one receives . We seek a system in ...
Contents
Higher Standards and Changing Priorities | 9 |
Increasing Access to Medical Care | 30 |
Dealing with Growth | 55 |
The lmpact of Growth | 89 |
A Changing Face for Medicine | 129 |
Progress in Health and the Role of Public Health | 158 |