It’s All About Money and Politics: Winning the Healthcare War

It’s All About Money and Politics: Winning the Healthcare War
Author: John D Sanderson
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2019-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1532084390

The healthcare business in the United States is broken! There are basically two choices for change. The first is to create a consumer-driven healthcare system. A properly designed system can reduce administrative costs, create competition based on price, quality, and service; provide a foundation for restructuring Medicare, and include those covered by Medicaid and the uninsured. The second choice is a single-payer national health plan run by the government that will result in extended waiting times for specialized services and potentially rationing based on age, diagnosis or other criteria. Some are now advocating Medicare for all including illegal residents the economic impact of which is incomprehensible and would guarantee rationing in one form or another. Examine the Veteran’s Administration system and then make your choice. Get involved or accept without complaint what others dictate!

It's All About Money and Politics

It's All About Money and Politics
Author: John D. Sanderson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2019-09-27
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781532084386

The healthcare business in the United States is broken! There are basically two choices for change. The first is to create a consumer-driven healthcare system. A properly designed system can reduce administrative costs, create competition based on price, quality, and service; provide a foundation for restructuring Medicare, and include those covered by Medicaid and the uninsured. The second choice is a single-payer national health plan run by the government that will result in extended waiting times for specialized services and potentially rationing based on age, diagnosis or other criteria. Some are now advocating Medicare for all including illegal residents the economic impact of which is incomprehensible and would guarantee rationing in one form or another. Examine the Veteran's Administration system and then make your choice. Get involved or accept without complaint what others dictate!

It's All about Money: Winning the Healthcare War!

It's All about Money: Winning the Healthcare War!
Author: John Sanderson
Publisher: iUniverse
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2008-05
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0595488439

If you want to fix healthcare in the United States, read this book! Healthcare costs have soared out of control for the past several decades. Much has been written about what "someone" should do to fix the problems. However, there has been very little written to tell you, your business, your community, and your elected officials HOW to lead the movement for change and how to take control of the healthcare business. This book is written in simple terms and explains how the U.S. healthcare business evolved; it identifies the major contributors to problems plaguing healthcare in the United States; and it leads you through the steps you can take to create a healthcare system that focuses on you and your family. Unfortunately, healthcare in the United States has not been designed to focus on you and your family-it has evolved around payment systems. It's all about money, not you! This is like the tail wagging the dog. You can lead the movement for change in healthcare and we can have a system in which the dog wags the tail.

Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care

Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care
Author: Stuart Altman
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Total Pages: 479
Release: 2011-09-27
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1616144572

Essential reading for every American who must navigate the US health care system. Why was the Obama health plan so controversial and difficult to understand? In this readable, entertaining, and substantive book, Stuart Altman—internationally recognized expert in health policy and adviser to five US presidents—and fellow health care specialist David Shactman explain not only the Obama health plan but also many of the intriguing stories in the hundred-year saga leading up to the landmark 2010 legislation. Blending political intrigue, policy substance, and good old-fashioned storytelling, this is the first book to place the Obama health plan within a historical perspective. The authors describe the sometimes haphazard, piece-by-piece construction of the nation’s health care system, from the early efforts of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to the later additions of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In each case, they examine the factors that led to success or failure, often by illuminating little-known political maneuvers that brought about immense shifts in policy or thwarted herculean efforts at reform. The authors look at key moments in health care history: the Hill–Burton Act in 1946, in which one determined poverty lawyer secured the rights of the uninsured poor to get hospital care; the "three-layer cake" strategy of powerful House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills to enact Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson in 1965; the odd story of how Medicare catastrophic insurance was passed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and then repealed because of public anger in 1989; and the fact that the largest and most expensive expansion of Medicare was enacted by George W. Bush in 2003. President Barack Obama is the protagonist in the climactic chapter, learning from the successes and failures chronicled throughout the narrative. The authors relate how, in the midst of a worldwide financial meltdown, Obama overcame seemingly impossible obstacles to accomplish what other presidents had tried and failed to achieve for nearly one hundred years.

America's Bitter Pill

America's Bitter Pill
Author: Steven Brill
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 603
Release: 2015-01-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812996968

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • “A tour de force . . . a comprehensive and suitably furious guide to the political landscape of American healthcare . . . persuasive, shocking.”—The New York Times America’s Bitter Pill is Steven Brill’s acclaimed book on how the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, was written, how it is being implemented, and, most important, how it is changing—and failing to change—the rampant abuses in the healthcare industry. It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of the titanic fight to pass a 961-page law aimed at fixing America’s largest, most dysfunctional industry. It’s a penetrating chronicle of how the profiteering that Brill first identified in his trailblazing Time magazine cover story continues, despite Obamacare. And it is the first complete, inside account of how President Obama persevered to push through the law, but then failed to deal with the staff incompetence and turf wars that crippled its implementation. But by chance America’s Bitter Pill ends up being much more—because as Brill was completing this book, he had to undergo urgent open-heart surgery. Thus, this also becomes the story of how one patient who thinks he knows everything about healthcare “policy” rethinks it from a hospital gurney—and combines that insight with his brilliant reporting. The result: a surprising new vision of how we can fix American healthcare so that it stops draining the bank accounts of our families and our businesses, and the federal treasury. Praise for America’s Bitter Pill “An energetic, picaresque, narrative explanation of much of what has happened in the last seven years of health policy . . . [Brill] has pulled off something extraordinary.”—The New York Times Book Review “A thunderous indictment of what Brill refers to as the ‘toxicity of our profiteer-dominated healthcare system.’ ”—Los Angeles Times “A sweeping and spirited new book [that] chronicles the surprisingly juicy tale of reform.”—The Daily Beast “One of the most important books of our time.”—Walter Isaacson “Superb . . . Brill has achieved the seemingly impossible—written an exciting book about the American health system.”—The New York Review of Books

The Ten Year War

The Ten Year War
Author: Jonathan Cohn
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-02-23
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1250270944

Jonathan Cohn's The Ten Year War is the definitive account of the battle over Obamacare, based on interviews with sources who were in the room, from one of the nation's foremost healthcare journalists. The Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare,” was the most sweeping and consequential piece of legislation of the last half century. It has touched nearly every American in one way or another, for better or worse, and become the defining political fight of our time. In The Ten Year War, veteran journalist Jonathan Cohn offers the compelling, authoritative history of how the law came to be, why it looks like it does, and what it’s meant for average Americans. Drawn from hundreds of hours of interviews, plus private diaries, emails and memos, The Ten Year War takes readers to Capitol Hill and to town hall meetings, inside the West Wing and, eventually, into Trump Tower, as the nation's most powerful leaders try to reconcile pragmatism and idealism, self-interest and the public good, and ultimately two very different visions for what the country should look like. At the heart of the book is the decades-old argument over what’s wrong with American health care and how to fix it. But the battle over healthcare was always about more than policy. The Ten Year War offers a deeper examination of how our governing institutions, the media and the two parties have evolved, and the dysfunction those changes have left in their wake.

Wounds of War

Wounds of War
Author: Suzanne Gordon
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 465
Release: 2018-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 1501730843

U.S. military conflicts abroad have left nine million Americans dependent on the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) for medical care. Their "wounds of war" are treated by the largest hospital system in the country—one that has come under fire from critics in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the nation's media. In Wounds of War, Suzanne Gordon draws on five years of observational research to describe how the VHA does a better job than private sector institutions offering primary and geriatric care, mental health and home care services, and support for patients nearing the end of life. In the unusual culture of solidarity between patients and providers that the VHA has fostered, Gordon finds a working model for higher-quality health care and a much-needed alternative to the practice of for-profit medicine.

Winner-Take-All Politics

Winner-Take-All Politics
Author: Jacob S. Hacker
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2010
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1416588701

Analyzes the growing divide between the incomes of the wealthy class and those of middle-income Americans, exonerating popular suspects to argue that the nation's political system promotes greed and under-representation.

An American Sickness

An American Sickness
Author: Elisabeth Rosenthal
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 434
Release: 2017-04-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0698407180

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.