The Evolution of the US Healthcare System: A Legacy of Opportunism and Greed

The Evolution of the US Healthcare System: A Legacy of Opportunism and Greed PDF

Author: Richard Douglass

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2023-02-27

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 1527594467

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This book tells the story of the United States’ healthcare system, which is built by and for the opportunistic motives of powerful corporations, politicians, and government initiatives. It answers questions that most people have about why it is that American healthcare claims to be the best in the world, yet Americans do not enjoy the longest or healthiest lives. Why is it that the United States spends much more on its healthcare system but gets less in return? How did the United States develop a healthcare system that is expensive, hard to use, and seems to be guided by profit seeking corporations instead of the health needs of the people? How did the US healthcare system respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, and what did the pandemic teach us about the strengths and weaknesses of the American way of health care? Legislators, health care students, consumers, policy makers, and advocates for health care justice can take this book as an introduction to the failing health care system that the author calls a threat to national security.

The Hidden History of American Healthcare

The Hidden History of American Healthcare PDF

Author: Thom Hartmann

Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers

Published: 2021-09-07

Total Pages: 134

ISBN-13: 1523091657

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Popular progressive radio host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann reveals how and why attempts to implement affordable universal healthcare in the United States have been thwarted and what we can do to finally make it a reality. "For-profit health insurance is the largest con job ever perpetrated on the American people—one that has cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives since the 1940s,” says Thom Hartmann. Other countries have shown us that affordable universal healthcare is not only possible but also effective and efficient. Taiwan's single-payer system saved the country a fortune as well as saving lives during the coronavirus pandemic, enabling the country to implement a nationwide coronavirus test-and-contact-trace program without shutting down the economy. This resulted in just ten deaths, while more than 500,000 people have died in the United States. Hartmann offers a deep dive into the shameful history of American healthcare, showing how greed, racism, and oligarchic corruption led to the current “sickness for profit” system. Modern attempts to create versions of government healthcare have been hobbled at every turn, including Obamacare. There is a simple solution: Medicare for all. Hartmann outlines the extraordinary benefits this system would provide the American people and economy and the steps we need to take to make it a reality. It's time for America to join every industrialized country in the world and make health a right, not a privilege.

Ensuring America's Health

Ensuring America's Health PDF

Author: Christy Ford Chapin

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-28

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 1316298965

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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.

Our Unsystematic Health Care System

Our Unsystematic Health Care System PDF

Author: Grace Budrys, PhD, Professor Emerita, Sociology and MPH Program, DePaul University

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

Published: 2011-12-16

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 1442210702

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This book presents readers with a comprehensive overview of the U.S. health care delivery system. The third edition has been significantly revised throughout to explain the Patient Protection and Health Care Affordability Act as it unfolds. Other key updates include more detailed discussions of health insurance, expanded information on health systems in other countries, and new case studies.

An American Sickness

An American Sickness PDF

Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2018-03-13

Total Pages: 434

ISBN-13: 0143110853

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A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

Bitter Medicine

Bitter Medicine PDF

Author: Jeanne Kassler

Publisher: Carol Publishing Corporation

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13:

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A woman doctor's examinations of our current health care crisis.

The American Healthcare Paradox

The American Healthcare Paradox PDF

Author: Myrtis Amabile

Publisher:

Published: 2021-05-13

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13:

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The United States has what is arguably the most complex healthcare system in the world. As a result, changes within the industry are slow. Understanding what may come, helps to have a deeper understanding of healthcare's complexity. The unimaginable paths he followed started in Bangkok but quickly led to the discovery that there were two groups of killers: doctors at Bumrungrad and a vast and cover corrupt system in the United States consisting of both the medical industry and the government whose interests are tied together by money! Both groups contributed to the death of her son. Even worse, driven by self-interested greed and unbridled power, the greatest healthcare system on earth, the US, has been brought to its knees and the prospects for the future of medical care in America and indeed, the world, promise a disaster of global scale.

The US Healthcare Dilemma

The US Healthcare Dilemma PDF

Author: Michael McGuire

Publisher: Praeger

Published: 1999-06-30

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13:

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Our modern society would never tolerate funding of any other necessity or convenience by such clumsy methods. In short, McGuire and Anderson contend we must pay for healthcare the way we pay for food, housing, clothing, and transportation."--BOOK JACKET.

Crisis in U.S. Health Care

Crisis in U.S. Health Care PDF

Author: M D John Geyman

Publisher:

Published: 2017-02-22

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781938218156

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The problems of U.S. health care are of intense public interest today. The debate over where to go next to rein in costs and improve access to quality health care has become bitterly partisan, with distorted rhetoric largely uninformed by history, evidence, or health policy science. Based on present trends, our expensive dysfunctional system threatens patients, families, the government, and taxpayers with future bankruptcy. This book takes a 60-year view of our health care system, from 1956 to 2016, from the perspective of a family physician who has lived through these years as a practitioner in two rural communities, a professor and administrator of family medicine in medical schools, a journal editor for 30 years, and a researcher and writer on health care for more than four decades. There has been a complete transformation of health care and medical practice over that time from physicians in solo or small group practice and community hospitals to an enormous, largely corporatized industry that has left behind many of the traditions of personalized health care. This is an objective, non-partisan look at the major trends changing U. S. health care over these years, ranging from increasing technology and uncontrollable costs to depersonalization and changing ethics in medicine and health care. This book points out some of the highs-and lows-of these changes over the years, which may surprise some readers. It also compares the three basic alternatives for health care reform currently being debated.

The Power of Greed

The Power of Greed PDF

Author: Michael Rosberg

Publisher: University of Alberta

Published: 2005-08-16

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13: 9780888644299

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The Power of Greed recommends a shift away from the moralistic way we often go about doing international development. It says we can be too focused on our own ambitions for others and too unaware of what they’re up to on their own behalf. It argues that the desperate and greedy behaviours of the poor and their oppressors are not the enemies of international development, but its potential allies. It also says we ought to resist taking sides in defence of the poor. Productive alliances between oppressed and oppressor are possible if the conditions are right. Furthermore, it says that we need to tie national institutional and economic strengthening measures to the creation of sustainable interest groups at the grassroots. Only they could be in a position to prevent greed and corruption at the top in a sustainable way. For these reasons, The Power of Greed tries to get us to focus on doing more about the opportunity structure in the developing world and, for the rest, to rely on the opportunism of the population.