Books on healthcare

“HEALTHCARE MELTDOWN”
Confronting the Myths and Fixing Our Failing System
by Bob LeBow, M.D.

“BLEEDING THE PATIENT”
The Consequences of Corporate Healthcare
by David Himmelstein, M.D., Steffie Woodhandler, M.D.
Ida Hellander, M.D.

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From the Division of Social and Community Medicine, Department of Medicine, The Cambridge Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, MA and The Public Citizen Health Research Group, Washington, DC

“The U.S. wastes more on health care bureaucracy than it would cost to provide health care to all of the uninsured. Administrative expenses will consume at least $399.4 billion out of total health expenditures of $1,660.5 billion in 2003. Streamlining administrative overhead to Canadian levels would save approximately $286.0 billion in 2003, $6,940 for each of the 41.2 million Americans who were uninsured as of 2001. This is substantially more than would be needed to provide full insurance coverage.” Continued

INSTITUTE OF MEDICINE
“Insuring America’s Health: Principles and Recommendations”
Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United States. Although America leads the world in spending on health care,
it is the only wealthy, industrialized nation that does not ensure that all citizens have coverage. To help policy-makers, elected officials, and others judge and compare proposals to extend coverage to the nation’s 43 million uninsured, the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies offers a set of guiding principles and a checklist in a new report, Insuring America’s Health: Principles and Recommendations. Continued

JAMA – Journal of the American Medical Association
Proposal of The Physicians’ Working Group for Single-Payer National Health Insurance JAMA. 2003;290:798-805.

The United States spends more than twice as much on health careas the average of other developed nations, all of which boastuniversal coverage. Yet more than
41 million Americans haveno health insurance. Many more are underinsured. Confrontedby the rising costs and capabilities of modern medicine, othernations have chosen national health insurance (NHI).

The UnitedStates alone treats health care as a commodity distributed according
to the ability to pay, rather than as a social service to bedistributed according to medical need. In this market-drivensystem, insurers and providers compete not so much by increasingquality or lowering costs, but by avoiding unprofitable patientsand shifting costs back to patients or to other payers. Thiscreates the paradox
of a health care system based on avoidingthe sick. It generates huge
administrative costs that, alongwith profits, divert resources from clinical care to the demandsof business. In addition, burgeoning satellite businesses, suchas consulting firms and marketing companies, consume an increasingfraction of the health care dollar. Continued