The Price We Pay

The Price We Pay PDF Author: Marty Makary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635574129
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

The Price We Pay

The Price We Pay PDF Author: Marty Makary
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1635574129
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book

Book Description
New York Times bestseller Business Book of the Year--Association of Business Journalists From the New York Times bestselling author comes an eye-opening, urgent look at America's broken health care system--and the people who are saving it--now with a new Afterword by the author. "A must-read for every American." --Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief, FORBES One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation's leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of the business of medicine and its elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine's noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable. The Price We Pay offers a road map for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well--a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

The Healthcare Fix

The Healthcare Fix PDF Author: Laurence J. Kotlikoff
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262263459
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
A simple, straightforward, and foolproof proposal for universal health insurance from a noted economist. The shocking statistic is that forty-seven million Americans have no health insurance. When uninsured Americans go to the emergency room for treatment, however, they do receive care, and a bill. Many hospitals now require uninsured patients to put their treatment on a credit card which can saddle a low-income household with unpayably high balances that can lead to personal bankruptcy. Why don't these people just buy health insurance? Because the cost of coverage that doesn't come through an employer is more than many low- and middle-income households make in a year. Meanwhile, rising healthcare costs for employees are driving many businesses under. As for government-supplied health care, ever higher costs and added benefits (for example, Part D, Medicare's new prescription drug coverage) make both Medicare and Medicaid impossible to sustain fiscally; benefits grow faster than the national per-capita income. It's obvious the system is broken. What can we do? In The Healthcare Fix, economist Laurence Kotlikoff proposes a simple, straightforward approach to the problem that would create one system that works for everyone and secure America's fiscal and economic future. Kotlikoff's proposed Medical Security System is not the "socialized medicine" so feared by Republicans and libertarians; it's a plan for universal health insurance. Because everyone would be insured, it's also a plan for universal healthcare. Participants—including all who are currently uninsured, all Medicaid and Medicare recipients, and all with private or employer-supplied insurance—would receive annual vouchers for health insurance, the amount of which would be based on their current medical condition. Insurance companies would willingly accept people with health problems because their vouchers would be higher. And the government could control costs by establishing the values of the vouchers so that benefit growth no longer outstrips growth of the nation's per capita income. It's a "single-payer" plan, but a single payer for insurance. The American healthcare industry would remain competitive, innovative, strong, and private. Kotlikoff's plan is strong medicine for America's healthcare crisis, but brilliant in its simplicity. Its provisions can fit on a postcard and Kotlikoff provides one, ready to be copied and mailed to your representative in Congress.

We Can Fix Healthcare in America

We Can Fix Healthcare in America PDF Author: Stephen K Klasko, M.D., MBA
Publisher: Mary Ann Liebert
ISBN: 9781934854426
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


The Long Fix

The Long Fix PDF Author: Vivian Lee
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0393867447
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
It may not be a quick fix, but this concrete action plan for reform can create a less costly and healthier system for all. Beyond the outrageous expense, the quality of care varies wildly, and millions of Americans can’t get care when they need it. This is bad for patients, bad for doctors, and bad for business. In The Long Fix, physician and health care CEO Vivian S. Lee, MD, cuts to the heart of the health care crisis. The problem with the way medicine is practiced, she explains, is not so much who’s paying, it’s what we are paying for. Insurers, employers, the government, and individuals pay for every procedure, prescription, and lab test, whether or not it makes us better—and that is both backward and dangerous. Dr. Lee proposes turning the way we receive care completely inside out. When doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies are paid to keep people healthy, care improves and costs decrease. Lee shares inspiring examples of how this has been done, from physicians’ practices that prioritize preventative care, to hospitals that adapt lessons from manufacturing plants to make them safer, to health care organizations that share online how much care costs and how well each physician is caring for patients. Using clear and compelling language, Dr. Lee paints a picture that is both realistic and optimistic. It may not be a quick fix, but her concrete action plan for reform—for employers and other payers, patients, clinicians, and policy makers—can reinvent health care, and create a less costly, more efficient, and healthier system for all.

Catastrophic Care

Catastrophic Care PDF Author: David Goldhill
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307961559
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
A visionary investigation that will change the way we think about health care: how and why it is failing, why expanding coverage will actually make things worse, and how our health care can be transformed into a transparent, affordable, successful system. In 2007, David Goldhill’s father died from infections acquired in a hospital, one of more than two hundred thousand avoidable deaths per year caused by medical error. The bill was enormous—and Medicare paid it. These circumstances left Goldhill angry and determined to understand how world-class technology and personnel could coexist with such carelessness—and how a business that failed so miserably could be paid in full. Catastrophic Care is the eye-opening result. Blending personal anecdotes and extensive research, Goldhill presents us with cogent, biting analysis that challenges the basic preconceptions that have shaped our thinking for decades. Contrasting the Island of health care with the Mainland of our economy, he demonstrates that high costs, excess medicine, terrible service, and medical error are the inevitable consequences of our insurance-based system. He explains why policy efforts to fix these problems have invariably produced perverse results, and how the new Affordable Care Act is more likely to deepen than to solve these issues. Goldhill steps outside the incremental and wonkish debates to question the conventional wisdom blinding us to more fundamental issues. He proposes a comprehensive new way, where the customer (the patient) is first—a system focused on health and maintaining it, a system strong and vibrant enough for our future. If you think health care is interesting only to institutes and politicians, think again: Catastrophic Care is surprising, engaging, and brimming with insights born of questions nobody has thought to ask. Above all it is a book of new ideas that can transform the way we understand a subject we often take for granted.

America's Bitter Pill

America's Bitter Pill PDF Author: Steven Brill
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812996968
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 603

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.”—The New York Times America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.”—The New York Times Book Review “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’ ”—Los Angeles Times “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.”—The Daily Beast “One of the most important books of our time.”—Walter Isaacson “Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system.”—The New York Review of Books

The Company That Solved Health Care

The Company That Solved Health Care PDF Author: John Torinus
Publisher: BenBella Books
ISBN: 1935618199
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Explains how employers can take control of the increasing burden of health care costs, using the approach taken by Serigraph, a company that focused on consumer responsibility, primary care, and centers of value, as a model for improving health care while lowering the cost.

Care Without Coverage

Care Without Coverage PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309083435
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.

Sickened

Sickened PDF Author: Shawn Needham Rph
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 118

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Book Description
For as long as I live, my wife, Janet and I will never forget that day. A pivotal moment in our career as compounding pharmacists that forever changed everything. Back in 2001, a morbidly obese patient came into our pharmacy. She was on around 20 different medications, ranging from high blood pressure to diabetes to high cholesterol. And they were costing her... Nothing. We were creating no value in her life. She didn't care who we were. She didn't care about the medications. She didn't care about how they worked, or anything related because it was costing her nothing... ... WE were a part of the problem (regardless of economic policy or what's learned in pharmacy school). Janet and I decided to change our commitment, and thus, our system. Click BUY to learn what we did in 2002 as a business and economic solution that was in alignment with our 100% commitment to enable others to ACTUALLY better their health... ... which leads to better families, ... which leads to better communities. (and how if you're a healthcare provider, aspiring pharmacology entrepreneur, interested in relevant pragmatic or deconstruction examples, or saving money for your own family... YOU can make a difference, too)... Our eyes and hearts were forever opened. Our commitment shifted that day to be a part of a positive solution. Period. In Sickened: How the Government Ruined Healthcare and How to Fix It, learn Shawn's 6-Step framework. Practical. Proven. Common sense (with a twist). And jaw dropping patient and provider stories! Click to BUY, learn, save money, and be empowered. For current or future pharmacy professionals, pharmacology students interested in learning how to make a REAL difference, interested in how to run a successful pharmacy business... medical professionals interested in examples and solutions for caregiving and medical ethics... PLUS... For those interested in not only a practical application of the philosophy of pragmatism and deconstruction, but ALSO economic policy in healthcare as it relates to the political science of our American government. You're not alone if you're wondering if making changes in our current healthcare system is really a pipe dream or is doable for the average American today. This is the most exciting time in our country's history to be a problem solving, solution focused, health care entrepreneur today and in the coming 20+ years. There IS a better way & hope for Healthcare in American... to ThinkOutsideTheSystem because OptimalHealthMatters. Join the Movement. ItsTime Click to Buy SickenedTheBook now.

Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries

Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries PDF Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309217105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
During the last 25 years, life expectancy at age 50 in the United States has been rising, but at a slower pace than in many other high-income countries, such as Japan and Australia. This difference is particularly notable given that the United States spends more on health care than any other nation. Concerned about this divergence, the National Institute on Aging asked the National Research Council to examine evidence on its possible causes. According to Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries, the nation's history of heavy smoking is a major reason why lifespans in the United States fall short of those in many other high-income nations. Evidence suggests that current obesity levels play a substantial part as well. The book reports that lack of universal access to health care in the U.S. also has increased mortality and reduced life expectancy, though this is a less significant factor for those over age 65 because of Medicare access. For the main causes of death at older ages-cancer and cardiovascular disease-available indicators do not suggest that the U.S. health care system is failing to prevent deaths that would be averted elsewhere. In fact, cancer detection and survival appear to be better in the U.S. than in most other high-income nations, and survival rates following a heart attack also are favorable. Explaining Divergent Levels of Longevity in High-Income Countries identifies many gaps in research. For instance, while lung cancer deaths are a reliable marker of the damage from smoking, no clear-cut marker exists for obesity, physical inactivity, social integration, or other risks considered in this book. Moreover, evaluation of these risk factors is based on observational studies, which-unlike randomized controlled trials-are subject to many biases.