The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It And What It WIll Take To Get Us Out, by Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein

American Health Care: I'll be sharing the titles, descriptions and Tables of Contents of all the books written in the last decade or so on Health Care in America. No one denies that it doesn't work as well as it should, but the various political parties - and radio talk show hosts - are divided in how to fix the problem.


The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It And What It WIll Take To Get Us Out, by Julius Richmond, MD and Rashi Fein, PhD
Harvard University Press, 2005
263 pages, plus notes and index. No photos
Library: 362.1 RIC
Description
If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmore 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.

Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumverate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have 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.

As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must once again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to the debate.

Table of Contents
Foreword by Jimmy Carter
Introduction
Part 1: The Early Years - 1900-1965
1. The Educational and Scientific revolution: Higher standards and changing priorities
2. The Consumer revolution: Increasing Access to Medical CAre

Part II: In the Wake of Medicare and Medicaid - 1965 to 1985
3. Emerging Tensions between Regulation and Market Forces: Dealing with Growth
4. Education for the Health Professions: the Impact of GRowth

Part III: Moving to the Presence - 1985 to 2005
5. The Rntreprenurial Revolution: A Changing Face for Medicine
6. Beyond the Dollars: Progress in Health and the Role of Public Health

Part IV: Anticipating the Next Revolution- 2005 and Beyond
7. Medical Challenges and Oppurtunities
8. Increasing Equity: Achieving Universal Health Insurance

Notes
Index

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