The Health Care Mess: How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get Out

by Julius B. Richmond, Rashi Fein, Jimmy Carter (Foreword by)

If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.

Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumvirate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have shaped medical practice and medical care. The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care.

As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.

Genres: Health Care

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 6, 2005

Reviews

[Nancy]

Although it took me a while to read it, I really like this book. I enjoyed reading the history of the health care issue in the United States. Who knew that Truman was the first president to propose a national health care system?! I liked that this book was written by two doctors. I liked their conclusions and road map of how to achieve an equitable, universal health care system in the US.

This book was published in 2005 and it is telling that little progress has been made. It is also interested that some of Drs. Richmond and Fein's solutions are included in the recently passed bill. This book, along with The Healing of America by T.R. Reid, should be required reading for all of our lawmakers and leaders.