My mother wanted me to be a physician, but as a child I was very squeamish about human biology and knew that wasn't for me. In college I was exposed to economics and found it, and the policy debates about national health insurance, fascinating. So, maybe with my mother’s wishes in the back of my mind, I became a health economist. I was privileged to direct a large randomized trial called the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, which varied the cost of medical care to families. This project lasted more than a decade and got me so deep into the economics of health and medical care that I became a professor of health policy and management.
Eminently readable, this is a classic book by the doyen of American health economics that explains in non-technical terms the economics of health and medical care. It has been updated with several essays that Fuchs has published in the almost five decades since the book was first published.
Since the first edition of Who Shall Live? (1974), over 100,000 students, teachers, physicians, and general readers from more than a dozen fields have found this book to be a reader-friendly, authoritative introduction to economic concepts applied to health and medical care.Health care is by far the largest industry in the United States. It is three times larger than education and five times as large as national defense. In 2001, Americans spent over $12,500 per person for hospitals, physicians, drugs and other health care services and goods. Other high-income democracies spend one third less, enjoy three more years of life…
Another classic book that describes the history of American medicine and organized medicine’s interactions with the political process.
It is necessary background to understand the predominance of employment-based health insurance and why the 2010 Affordable Care Act was such a breakthrough. Starr is a Princeton sociologist who participated in the 1990s debate on the failed Clinton health insurance plan.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, The Social Transformation of American Medicine is a landmark history of the American health care system, examining how the roles of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries. Beginning in 1730 and coming up to the present day, renowned sociologist Paul Starr traces the transformation of our national health care system into a private corporate medical institution that dominates the field and threatens the sovereignty of the medical profession. In this new and revised edition, Paul Starr will bring his research…
Who Will Take Care of Me When I'm Old?
By
Joy Loverde,
Everything you need to know to plan for your own safe, financially secure, healthy, and happy old age.
For those who have no support system in place, the thought of aging without help can be a frightening, isolating prospect. Whether you have friends and family ready and able to help…
In individual chapters, this book describes every American President’s approach to health policy from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush (it omits Gerald Ford).
It describes their personal and familial interactions with health and medical care as well as their foibles and habits. It is a fascinating read, especially for those of an age who personally lived through some of these Presidents.
Even the most powerful men in the world are human - they get sick, take dubious drugs, drink too much, contemplate suicide, fret about ailing parents, and bury people they love. Young Richard Nixon watched two brothers die of tuberculosis, even while doctors monitored a suspicious shadow on his own lungs. John Kennedy received last rites four times as an adult, and Lyndon Johnson suffered a 'belly buster' of a heart attack. David Blumenthal and James A. Morone explore how modern presidents have wrestled with their own mortality - and how they have taken this most human experience to heart…
This book, by three eminent economists who themselves have advanced the theory of insurance markets, describes in non-technical terms exactly what its title promises, why insurance markets fail.
In other words, it describes why public intervention is necessary to make insurance function well. The public intervention can take many forms, ranging from subsidies to national health services, but no industrialized country leaves health insurance entirely to a private market.
An engaging and accessible examination of what ails insurance markets-and what to do about it-by three leading economists
Why is dental insurance so crummy? Why is pet insurance so expensive? Why does your auto insurer ask for your credit score? The answer to these questions lies in understanding how insurance works. Unlike the market for other goods and services-for instance, a grocer who doesn't care who buys the store's broccoli or carrots-insurance providers are more careful in choosing their customers, because some are more expensive than others.
Unraveling the mysteries of insurance markets, Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, and Ray Fisman…
Duke, the leader of a bike gang, is in custody for murder. He plans an escape by feigning illness and hospitalization. But an unexpected turn of events results in two gang members and Duke holding a medical floor of patients hostage. Patients will die if the police don't meet their…
Almost all Americans think the high cost of health care is a major problem and a large number think access to services is also a problem.
Many, however, think that if a person has access to medical care and good insurance, quality of care is excellent. That’s sometimes true, but often not as this book describes.
In the United States, the soaring cost of health care has become an economic drag and a political flashpoint. Moreover, although the country's medical spending is higher than that of any other nation, health outcomes are no better than elsewhere, and in some cases are even worse. In The Quality Cure, renowned health care economist and former Obama advisor David Cutler offers an accessible and incisive account of the issues and their causes, as well as a road map for the future of health care reform--one that shows how information technology, realigned payment systems, and value-focused organizations together have the…
This book is the Walras-Pareto Lectures, given at the University of Lausanne in 1997. It takes up the economics of how to reimburse providers of medical care such as hospitals and physicians and is based on the author’s experience as chair of a standing Congressional Commission, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, that annually recommends to the Congress what the American Medicare program should pay.
The Model Spy is based on the true story of Toto Koopman, who spied for the Allies and Italian Resistance during World War II.
Largely unknown today, Toto was arguably the first woman to spy for the British Intelligence Service. Operating in the hotbed of Mussolini's Italy, she courted danger…
It didn’t begin with Donald Trump. When the Republican Party lost five straight presidential elections during the 1930s and 1940s, three things happened: (1) Republicans came to believe that presidential elections are rigged; (2) Conspiracy theories arose and were believed; and (3) The presidency was elevated to cult-like status.
