Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System

by David M. Cutler

The problems of medical care confront us a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. "Medical care is in crisis," we are repeatedly told, and so it is. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well.
Enter David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's health care task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues in Your Money or Your Life that health care has in fact improved exponentially over the last fifty years, and that the successes of our system suggest ways in which we might improve care, make the system easier to deal with, and extend coverage to all Americans. Cutler applies an economic analysis to show that our spending on medicine is well worth it--and that we could do even better by spending more. Further, millions of people with easily manageable diseases, from hypertension to depression to diabetes, receive either too much or too little care because of inefficiencies in the way we reimburse care, resulting in poor health and in some cases premature death.
The key to improving the system, Cutler argues, is to change the way we organize health care. Everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and payments should be based on the quality of services provided not just on the amount of cutting and poking performed.
Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming health care--one that promises to break through the stalemate of failed reform.

Genres: Nonfiction, Health Care, Economics, Health

176 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2003

Reviews

[Matt Mason]

Tries to appear neutral but applies selective logic that ameliorates the policy goals of private interests.

[Neha]

It wasn't until I was 2/3 of the way through the book that I realized the book was 10 years old. I think that the author has some good points regarding changing incentives in health care. This however is the easy part, the design, implementation, and evaluation of incentives- not so easy. I wouldn't really recommend this book unless you want to get a little background history on the state of health care over the past 20 years. I only say that because of the age of the book- I would be interested in reading more recent work by this author.

[Julia Liu]

3.5 stars

Easy to read and a good intro to the health care system

[Diana Eng]

Informative but outdated. I hoped that this book would have been more thorough in exploring America's health care system.

[Matt]

Simple quick explanation of our how medical system works, what elements might be broken, and how we might start to fix them. Does an especially good job of arguing that more medical care spending tends to be better, and that focusing more on preventative care and less on intensive care (i.e., focus on "value per dollar) would generally improve health outcomes. Cutler is a health care economist -- really knows his stuff. FYI, apparently, the typical human values life @ $5 million, and the typical value of one health year is $100,000. :)

[Tarythe Albrecht]

I loved this book...really fascinating look at the healthcare system, why it is inefficient, and what could be done to improve it. It was not politically charged, merely looked at the actual issues rather than being "us vs. them". It also helped me better understand the way the system works, and I feel more confident both in having a discussion with others about healthcare, as well as navigating it for myself and my family!

[Anna]

this book is from 1992, but itʻs still a hood read. informative, ... terrifying.
i wish more would have changed in the past 25 years regarding healthcare industry. itʻs still for the profitnof the industry, not the people. even if there now is "affordable" healthcare options

[Lakshman Swamy]

A short read that helps frame the debate on the goals of health care reform. Don't agree with everything Cutler says, but it definitely widened my perspective.

[Teyanna Munyan]

Great review of the American health care system!

[Ariadna73]

I liked this book, but found it a little outdated, especially regarding all the new information concerning Obamacare and the like.