Health care in America

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Jeff Kane, MD

Not long ago, "bedside manner" was a physician's most potent medicine. Now that skill has dwindled to bland, generic amiability, and has been all but lost behind today's compelling healthcare technology. The bedside manner's shrinkage would be tolerable if medical high tech could cure everything, but these amazing tools are alarmingly cost-ineffective in treating most patients--those who suffer from chronic, incurable illnesses and the effects of detrimental lifestyles. Paying far too much for too little return, Americans are understandably demanding healthcare reform, which we're told lies in rearranging national finances. But beyond financial adjustment, authentic reform will have to come from reinstating ancient, intimate healing relationships between patient and doctor. Healing the Heart of Healthcare describes how we arrived at this sorry impasse and where we need to go with a system that is as damaging to its doctors as it is to patients. Dr. Jeff Kane pinpoints and examines America's love affair with medical technology, insistence on evading death at any cost, and practice of enabling unhealthy lifestyles. At its heart, Healing the Heart of Healthcare shows that healing can begin only once doctors see patients clearly as individuals, and that through intimate contact, suffering can be productively treated.

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Alan I. Marcus and Hamilton Cravens

"How can we have received so many benefits while still being as worried as ever about our health and the health care system established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this question by identifying two points of significant change in health care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit. Then in the late 1960s, a palpable sense of limits rendered the individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation: the greater the access or benefits that any one person received, the less access and fewer benefits others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of expertise have been affected by the changes."--BOOK JACKET.

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William Jack

Health indicators in developing countries have shown impressive improvements in the past 50 years. But the health status of individuals in these countries remains well below its potential level, and many people lack access to suitable health care and health-promoting services. This book attempts to provide a suitable economic framework that will foster an understanding of the allocation of broadly defined health care resources, and to aid the design and analysis of policies that affect health outcomes. It addressed both positive and normative issues in the economics of health, and in this sense is similar in approach, if not in scope, to public finance texts. Indeed, in many respects, the book represents an application of public economics, including developments in the past 20 years in the economics of information and incentives, to the analysis of health care resource allocations. Part I focuses on health outcomes and the relationships between such outcomes and orthodox variables that measure macroeconomic performance. Part II adopts a more macroeconomic focus in analyzing demand and supply in health care markets. Part III takes on a more normative approach, reviewing both projects and policies. An attempt to address some broad issues in the design and implementation of national health systems can be found in the last chapter.

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Christi[a]ne I. Zeichner

This volume addresses the major problem areas that contribute to poor health conditions in the third world: poverty, poor sanitation, uneven distribution of health resources and services, suboptimal planning, poor management, and political instability. Its focus, however, is on the conflict and cooperation between traditional health care systems and their modern counterparts. Despite an idealization of scientific medical knowledge and technology in the developing world, barriers exist that often prevent their direct application. These barriers usually reflect conflicting socio-cultural and political attitudes toward health modernization. Consequently as scientific medical technology is used in modernization efforts, and as inter-systemic conflicts and disharmonies increase, the importance of understanding the traditional values of the people who live in the 3rd world's rural areas grow more urgent. Modernization goals and ideals of developing countries reflect those of their educated, politically articulate sector. The judgements that follow therefore, usually emanate from those leaders. Leaders' attitudes may not reflect those targeted for governmental health programs--the rural poor--whose perceptions and values will greatly determine the success of governmental health modernization policies. Conflict occurs, when indigenous populations resist or create obstacles to modern health care approaches. Traditional leaders and healers then struggle to protect their own interests, and those of their people. -- From (Oct. 14, 2016).