Road to Reform - Hardcover

Ginzberg

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0029117151 ISBN 13: 9780029117156

Publisher: Free Press, 1994

Analyzes the development and shortcomings of the current United States health care system, and discusses interested parties and possible reforms

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Clear analysis of how our health care system came to be the way it is and what challenges lie ahead. Director since 1950 of Columbia University's Eisenhower Center for the Conservation of Human Resources, Ginzberg (Beyond Human Scale, 1985, etc.) describes the factors--unprecedented federal support for biomedical research, a greatly increased supply of physicians, hospital growth and modernization, and massive restructuring of health care financing--that have reshaped our health care system since WW II. He asserts that much is right with the present system: it offers clinical excellence, a high level of quality control, and, for most Americans, freedom of choice of physicians. Its flaws, however, are serious--the principal ones being lack of universal access to appropriate care and skyrocketing costs. These, plus numerous others--such as an imbalance between specialists and general practitioners, overuse of technology, and burdensome regulations--come under the author's scrutiny. Having concluded that the present system cannot long endure, he considers what must be done to fix it. The first priority is to ensure its future financial stability. Once that is accomplished, Ginzberg says, we can begin to strengthen the health-care delivery system- -i.e., provide universal access, reform medical education, consider alternative modes of physician practice, restructure hospital services, and deal with quality assurance problems. Ginzberg gives President Clinton high marks for tackling the two most pressing issues of cost control and universal access, but if there is one message he delivers, it is that the health-care system has many facets and that no single program can reform its multiplicity of problems. Valuable as an overview--despite a tendency to be repetitious and to oversimplify complex issues. -- Copyright �1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist:

Ginzberg, an adviser to nine presidents on health policy issues, offers "nonspecialist readers" this overview of the evolution of the U.S. health-care system since 1946, its strengths and weaknesses, areas that most urgently demand reform, and the political and fiscal constraints on our choices as we debate the optimal design of a reformed system. Ginzberg differs from most mainstream, market-oriented analysts in his insistence that financing reform--"comprehensive budgetary restraint" on the flow of dollars into the health-care system, plus longer-term measures to cut tax subsidies for employers and employees and raise Medicare/Medicaid cost sharing for the wealthy and the middle class--must precede delivery reform: most critically, universal access, restructured medical education, new forms of physician practice, rationalization of hospital resources, and implementation of effective quality controls. On other subjects (e.g., a single-payer plan), he voices conventional objections. Road to Reform is a pragmatic, readable summary for nonprofessionals of the past, present, and some possible futures of the U.S. health-care system. Mary Carroll

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.