American Health Care Blues

American Health Care Blues PDF Author: Irwin Miller
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412816946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Making novel use of the sociology of organizations and pragmatic philosophy, Irwin Miller sheds new light on the nature and evolution of both the Blues and American health care voluntarism and reform. He shows how Walter McNerney, one of the primary health policy shapers over the past forty years, used ideological and utopian rhetoric to help move Blue Cross into HMO development. This case study of institutional and leadership behavior uses firsthand interviews, archival documents, oral histories, and other materials to present an unusually concrete and readable narrative account as to how health care leaders engage in creative institution building, or health care reform.

American Health Care Blues

American Health Care Blues PDF Author: Irwin Miller
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412816946
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
Making novel use of the sociology of organizations and pragmatic philosophy, Irwin Miller sheds new light on the nature and evolution of both the Blues and American health care voluntarism and reform. He shows how Walter McNerney, one of the primary health policy shapers over the past forty years, used ideological and utopian rhetoric to help move Blue Cross into HMO development. This case study of institutional and leadership behavior uses firsthand interviews, archival documents, oral histories, and other materials to present an unusually concrete and readable narrative account as to how health care leaders engage in creative institution building, or health care reform.

The Blues

The Blues PDF Author: Robert Maris Cunningham
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780875802244
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
A history of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield system, America's largest and oldest health insurer, from its beginnings to the 1990s. It draws on company archives and shows how its management has pursued the goal of health care coverage over seven decades of social and economic change.

Dying in the City of the Blues

Dying in the City of the Blues PDF Author: Keith Wailoo
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469617412
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This groundbreaking book chronicles the history of sickle cell anemia in the United States, tracing its transformation from an "invisible" malady to a powerful, yet contested, cultural symbol of African American pain and suffering. Set in Memphis, home of one of the nation's first sickle cell clinics, Dying in the City of the Blues reveals how the recognition, treatment, social understanding, and symbolism of the disease evolved in the twentieth century, shaped by the politics of race, region, health care, and biomedicine. Using medical journals, patients' accounts, black newspapers, blues lyrics, and many other sources, Keith Wailoo follows the disease and its sufferers from the early days of obscurity before sickle cell's "discovery" by Western medicine; through its rise to clinical, scientific, and social prominence in the 1950s; to its politicization in the 1970s and 1980s. Looking forward, he considers the consequences of managed care on the politics of disease in the twenty-first century. A rich and multilayered narrative, Dying in the City of the Blues offers valuable new insight into the African American experience, the impact of race relations and ideologies on health care, and the politics of science, medicine, and disease.

Reinventing American Health Care

Reinventing American Health Care PDF Author: Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1610393465
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
The definitive story of American health care today -- its causes, consequences, and confusions. In March 2010, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. It was the most extensive reform of America's health care system since at least the creation of Medicare in 1965, and maybe ever. The ACA was controversial and highly political, and the law faced legal challenges reaching all the way to the Supreme Court; it even precipitated a government shutdown. It was a signature piece of legislation for President Obama's first term, and also a ball and chain for his second. Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own -- quite distinct -- American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years. Emanuel also explains exactly how the ACA reforms are reshaping the health care system now. He forecasts the future, identifying six mega trends in health that will determine the market for health care to 2020 and beyond. His predictions are bold, provocative, and uniquely well-informed. Health care -- one of America's largest employment sectors, with an economy the size of the GDP of France -- has never had a more comprehensive or authoritative interpreter.

The Economic Evolution of American Health Care

The Economic Evolution of American Health Care PDF Author: David Dranove
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400824680
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
The American health care industry has undergone such dizzying transformations since the 1960s that many patients have lost confidence in a system they find too impersonal and ineffectual. Is their distrust justified and can confidence be restored? David Dranove, a leading health care economist, tackles these and other key questions in the first major economic and historical investigation of the field. Focusing on the doctor-patient relationship, he begins with the era of the independently practicing physician--epitomized by Marcus Welby, the beloved father figure/doctor in the 1960s television show of the same name--who disappeared with the growth of managed care. Dranove guides consumers in understanding the rapid developments of the health care industry and offers timely policy recommendations for reforming managed care as well as advice for patients making health care decisions. The book covers everything from start-up troubles with the first managed care organizations to attempts at government regulation to the mergers and quality control issues facing MCOs today. It also reflects on how difficult it is for patients to shop for medical care. Up until the 1970s, patients looked to autonomous physicians for recommendations on procedures and hospitals--a process that relied more on the patient's trust of the physician than on facts, and resulted in skyrocketing medical costs. Newly emerging MCOs have tried to solve the shopping problem by tracking the performance of care providers while obtaining discounts for their clients. Many observers accuse MCOs of caring more about cost than quality, and argue for government regulation. Dranove, however, believes that market forces can eventually achieve quality care and cost control. But first, MCOs must improve their ways of measuring provider performance, medical records must be made more complete and accessible (a task that need not compromise patient confidentiality), and patients must be willing to seek and act on information about the best care available. Dranove argues that patients can regain confidence in the medical system, and even come to trust MCOs, but they will need to rely on both their individual doctors and their own consumer awareness.

Health Care in America

Health Care in America PDF Author: John C. Burnham
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421416093
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 429

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Book Description
A comprehensive history of sickness, health, and medicine in America from Colonial times to the present. In Health Care in America, historian John C. Burnham describes changes over four centuries of medicine and public health in America. Beginning with seventeenth-century concerns over personal and neighborhood illnesses, Burnham concludes with the arrival of a new epoch in American medicine and health care at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the 1600s through the 1990s, Americans turned to a variety of healers, practices, and institutions in their efforts to prevent and survive epidemics of smallpox, yellow fever, cholera, influenza, polio, and AIDS. Health care workers in all periods attended births and deaths and cared for people who had injuries, disabilities, and chronic diseases. Drawing on primary sources, classic scholarship, and a vast body of recent literature in the history of medicine and public health, Burnham finds that traditional healing, care, and medicine dominated the United States until the late nineteenth century, when antiseptic/aseptic surgery and germ theory initiated an intellectual, social, and technical transformation. He divides the age of modern medicine into several eras: physiological medicine (1910s–1930s), antibiotics (1930s–1950s), technology (1950s–1960s), environmental medicine (1970s–1980s), and, beginning around 1990, genetic medicine. The cumulating developments in each era led to today's radically altered doctor-patient relationship and the insistent questions that swirl around the financial cost of health care. Burnham's sweeping narrative makes sense of medical practice, medical research, and human frailties and foibles, opening the door to a new understanding of our current concerns.

Ensuring America's Health

Ensuring America's Health PDF Author: Christy Ford Chapin
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316298965
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
Ensuring America's Health explains why the US health care system offers world-class medical services to some patients but is also exceedingly costly, with fragmented care, poor distribution, and increasingly bureaucratized processes. Based on exhaustive historical research, this work traces how public and private power merged to favor a distinctive economic model that places insurance companies at the center of the system, where they both finance and oversee medical care. Although the insurance company model was created during the 1930s, it continues to drive health care cost and quality problems today. This wide-ranging work not only evaluates the overarching political and economic framework of the medical system but also provides rich narrative detail, examining the political dramas, corporate maneuverings, and forceful personalities that created American health care as we know it. This book breaks new ground in the fields of health care history, organizational studies, and American political economy.

Chesapeake Bay Blues

Chesapeake Bay Blues PDF Author: Howard R. Ernst
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780742523517
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
The USA touts Chesapeake Bay as its premier environmental restoration programme, yet the Bay remains in poor condition.

Medicare Prospective Payment and the Shaping of U.S. Health Care

Medicare Prospective Payment and the Shaping of U.S. Health Care PDF Author: Rick Mayes
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 0801888875
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
This is the definitive work on Medicare’s prospective payment system (PPS), which had its origins in the 1972 Social Security Amendments, was first applied to hospitals in 1983, and came to fruition with the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. Here, Rick Mayes and Robert A. Berenson, M.D., explain how Medicare’s innovative payment system triggered shifts in power away from the providers (hospitals and doctors) to the payers (government insurers and employers) and how providers have responded to encroachments on their professional and financial autonomy. They conclude with a discussion of the problems with the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 and offer prescriptions for how policy makers can use Medicare payment policy to drive improvements in the U.S. health care system. Mayes and Berenson draw from interviews with more than sixty-five major policy makers—including former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin, U.S. Representatives Pete Stark and Henry Waxman, former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, and former administrators of the Health Care Financing Administration Gail Wilensky, Bruce Vladeck, Nancy-Ann DeParle, and Tom Scully—to explore how this payment system worked and its significant effects on the U.S. medical landscape in the past twenty years. They argue that, although managed care was an important agent of change in the 1990s, the private sector has not been the major health care innovator in the United States; rather, Medicare’s transition to PPS both initiated and repeatedly intensified the economic restructuring of the U.S. health care system.

Encyclopedia of Health Services Research

Encyclopedia of Health Services Research PDF Author: Ross M. Mullner
Publisher: SAGE Publications
ISBN: 1452266115
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 1457

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Book Description
Today, as never before, healthcare has the ability to enhance the quality and duration of life. At the same time, healthcare has become so costly that it can easily bankrupt governments and impoverish individuals and families. Health services research is a highly multidisciplinary field, including such areas as health administration, health economics, medical sociology, medicine, , political science, public health, and public policy. The Encyclopedia of Health Services Research is the first single reference source to capture the diversity and complexity of the field. With more than 400 entries, these two volumes investigate the relationship between the factors of cost, quality, and access to healthcare and their impact upon medical outcomes such as death, disability, disease, discomfort, and dissatisfaction with care. Key Features Examines the growing healthcare crisis facing the United States Encompasses the structure, process, and outcomes of healthcare Aims to improve the equity, efficiency, effectiveness, and safety of healthcare by influencing and developing public policies Describes healthcare systems and issues from around the globe Key Themes Access to Care Accreditation, Associations, Foundations, and Research Organizations Biographies of Current and Past Leaders Cost of Care, Economics, Finance, and Payment Mechanisms Disease, Disability, Health, and Health Behavior Government and International Healthcare Organizations Health Insurance Health Professionals and Healthcare Organizations Health Services Research Laws, Regulations, and Ethics Measurement; Data Sources and Coding; and Research Methods Outcomes of Care Policy Issues, Healthcare Reform, and International Comparisons Public Health Quality and Safety of Care Special and Vulnerable Groups The Encyclopedia is designed to be an introduction to the various topics of health services research for an audience including undergraduate students, graduate students, andgeneral readers seeking non-technical descriptions of the field and its practices. It is also useful for healthcare practitioners wishing to stay abreast of the changes and updates in the field.