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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... sectors who pay higher and higher premiums and allocate larger and larger budgets for ever more re- stricted coverage . This book helps us understand the strengths of our system as well as what is wrong with it . Most important , it ...
... sector , and the tens of millions of Americans who deserve and want a better system . We hope that this book will provide them all with a better understanding of " how we got here , " the possibilities and policy options that lie before ...
... sector policy formulation . That made possible count- less hours of conversation about health policy and the directions that the nation's health care system was taking . Though we came with dif- ferent backgrounds and out of different ...
... sector on expenditures , on the regulatory attempts to control their growth , and on education for the health professions . As a consequence of the failure of regulatory efforts to control ex- penditures , the body politic turned to the ...
... sector insurance will continue to leave an increasing number of our fellow citizens without insurance and without appropriate care . We examine the cri- teria that should guide efforts to develop a universal health program and offer our ...
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 |