BookThomas Bodenheimer, Kevin Grumbach, Rachel Willard-Grace.
Summary: "This is a book about health policy as well as individual patients and caregivers and how they interact with each other and with the overall health system. When treating a patient's illness, health expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product or variations in surgical rates between one city and another seem remote if not irrelevant-but they are neither remote nor irrelevant. Health policy affects the patients we see on a daily basis. Managed care referral rules determine which specialist will see a patient; coverage gaps in the Medicare benefit package affects access to care for the elderly. Understanding Health Policy hopes to bridge the gap separating the microworld of individual patient care and the macrouniverse of health policy"-- Provided by publisher.
Contents:
Introduction: the strengths and weaknesses of US health care
How money moves
Paying for health care: health insurance and access to health care
Paying health care providers: health equity
Medical ethics and rationing of health care
How health care is organized I: primary, secondary, and tertiary care
How health care is organized II: health care delivery systems
The health care workforce and the education of health professionals
Long-term care
Painful versus painless cost control
Mechanisms for controlling costs
Quality of health care
Population health and disease prevention
Health care in four nations
Health care reform and national health insurance
The business of US health care
Conclusion: tensions and challenges
Questions to assess understanding.