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A Second Opinion: Rescuing America's Health Care
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.10425
EAN: 9781586484811
Edition: 1
ISBN: 1586484818
Label: PublicAffairs
Manufacturer: PublicAffairs
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 224
Publication Date: April 23, 2007
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Studio: PublicAffairs
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Editorial Review:
The U.S. healthcare system is failing. It is run like a business, increasingly focused on generating income for insurers and providers rather than providing care for patients. It is supported by investors and private markets seeking to grow revenue and resist regulation, thus contributing to higher costs and lessened public accountability. Meanwhile, forty-six million Americans are without insurance. Health care expenditures are rising at a rate of 7 percent a year, three times the rate of inflation.Dr. Arnold Relman is one of the most respected physicians and healthcare advocates in our country. This book, based on sixty years' experience in medicine, is a clarion call not just to politicians and patients but to the medical profession to evolve a new structure for healthcare, based on voluntary private contracts between individuals and not-for-profit, multi-specialty groups of physicians. Physicians would be paid mainly by salaries and would submit no bills for their services. All health care facilities would be not-for-profit. The savings from reduced administrative overhead and the elimination of billing fraud would be enormous. Healthcare may be our greatest national problem, but the provocative, sensible arguments in this book will provide a catalyst for change.
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - A Second Opinion, Arnold Relman MD
Superb "tough love" analysis of the way commercialization of healthcare has driven behavior predictably towards financial rewards while perpetuating disparities in access and quality of care and severely eroding the primary care workforce necessary for rational care for our next generation. Dr. Relman candidly acknowledges that correction of these patterns will cause some financial hurt to entrepreneurial physicians and physicians in highly remunerative procedural niches, as well as the familiar ... Read More
Rating:  - Worthy concerns, weak arguments
Dr. Relman calls for health care reform based on prepaid group practices, regulated and paid by the federal government. His objective, gradually developed in Chapters 1 through 4, is high quality health care for everyone at reasonable cost. In Chapter 5, he offers ideas on how prepaid group practices might best work. Nowhere, however, does he provide an organized case for this approach to reform, comparing it point-by-point with pertinent alternatives, citing evidence to show who benefits and who ... Read More
Rating: - Excellent and Authoritative Information
Dr. Relman begins by asserting that America's health care system is much too expensive and its costs are rising at an unsustainable rate. Further, care is not available to many who need it most, and it is provided inefficiently and with highly variable quality.
By most measures of national health we rank well below many other advanced countries that spend less. Why is this? Dr. Relman believes it is due to the extent that private enterprise governs insurance and the provision of care, ... Read More
Rating: - A very important issue in the U.S.
This topic is very much needed in the U.S. at this time. Each of the Presidential candidates should read it.
Rating: - Second Opinion Seconded
This is a step in the right direction, but faces massive opposition from the insurance, pharmaceutical, medical device and hospital administration segments that are profiting from the present situation. But the excess money that goes to them could easily fund the uninsured. And then we need to recognize that there is at present absolutely no incentive in the present system to save money. But we'll need to re-train an army of insurance clerks and their managers to start working for the good of patients ... Read More
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