In this Book
- Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump
- Book
- 2018
- Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
summary
Written for nonexperts, this is a brisk, engaging history of American healthcare from the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the 2010s. Step by step, Jonathan Engel shows how we arrived at our present convoluted situation, where generic drugs prices can jump 1,000 percent in a day and primary care physicians can lose 20 percent of their income at the stroke of a Congressional pen.
Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.
Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.
Table of Contents
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- Introduction
- pp. 3-9
- 1. A System Run Amok
- pp. 10-32
- 2. Medical Free Markets
- pp. 33-52
- 3. Reining in the Excess
- pp. 53-67
- 4. The Lure of Profits
- pp. 68-80
- 5. Efforts to Rationalize
- pp. 81-101
- 6. HillaryCare
- pp. 102-123
- 7. Managing Care
- pp. 124-144
- 8. Quantity and Quality
- pp. 145-153
- 9. Ethical Wrangling
- pp. 154-168
- 11. (Un)Affordable Care
- pp. 189-214
- 12. Afterword
- pp. 215-224
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 225-226
Additional Information
ISBN
9780299314132
Related ISBN(s)
9780299314101, 9780299314187
MARC Record
OCLC
1018944960
Pages
295
Launched on MUSE
2018-01-18
Language
English
Open Access
No