Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. viii, 255 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

1. Americans are understandably concerned about the runaway costs of medical care and the fact that one citizen out of seven is without health insurance coverage. Solving these problems is a top priority for the Clinton administration, but as Victor Fuchs shows, the task is enormously complex. In this book Fuchs, America's foremost health economist, provides the reader with the necessary concepts, facts, and analyses to fully comprehend the complicated issues of health policy. He shows why health care reform that benefits society as a whole will unavoidably burden certain individuals and groups. Fuchs addresses such central questions as cost containment, managed competition, technology assessment, poverty and health, children's health, and national health insurance. Comparing the U.S. health care system with those of other nations, he shows, for instance, that the Canadian system works far better for Canadians than the American system works for Americans. Yet he cautions against thinking that the United States could easily adopt the Canadian system, given its very different social and political underpinnings. The future of U.S. health policy, Fuchs argues, is tightly linked to three basic questions. First, how can we disengage health insurance from employment? Second, how can we tame, but not destroy, technologic change in health care? And finally, how can we cope with the runaway medical costs of an aging society? In a striking passage, he writes that as financial and ethical pressures mount, we will probably see the right to death with dignity transformed into an expectation and eventually into an obligation. For anyone who wants a reliable guide through the myriad proposals on health care reform, this book is must reading.

Subject

1. Medical economics > United States
2. Medical policy > United States
3. Medical economics
4. Medical policy
5. Economics, Medical
6. Health Policy
7. Medical economics
8. Medical policy
9. Finanzierung
10. Gesundheitspolitik
11. Gesundheitswesen
12. Gesundheitsökonomie
13. Gezondheidszorg
14. Economische aspecten
15. Medical economics > United States
16. Medical policy > United States
17. United States
18. USA

Contents

1. Conceptual issues -- What is health? -- What is health economics? -- Price of health -- Poverty and health -- Empirical studies -- U.S. health expenditures and the gross national product -- How Canada does it: physicians' services -- How Canada does it: acute hospital care -- Expenditures for reproduction-related health care -- America's children -- Policy analysis -- Cost containment: no pain, no gain -- Competition revolution of the 1980s -- Counterrevolution in health care financing -- Technology assessment and health policy -- National health insurance revisited.

Owning institution

1. Princeton University Library

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references and index.