Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 - Softcover

Hoffman, Beatrix

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022610219X ISBN 13: 9780226102191

Publisher: The University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

In Health Care for Some, Beatrix Hoffman offers an engaging and in-depth look at America’s long tradition of unequal access to health care. She argues that two main features have characterized the US health system: a refusal to adopt a right to care and a particularly American approach to the rationing of care. Health Care for Some shows that the haphazard way the US system allocates medical services—using income, race, region, insurance coverage, and many other factors—is a disorganized, illogical, and powerful form of rationing. And unlike rationing in most countries, which is intended to keep costs down, rationing in the United States has actually led to increased costs, resulting in the most expensive health care system in the world.

While most histories of US health care emphasize failed policy reforms, Health Care for Some looks at the system from the ground up in order to examine how rationing is experienced by ordinary Americans and how experiences of rationing have led to claims for a right to health care. By taking this approach, Hoffman puts a much-needed human face on a topic that is too often dominated by talking heads.

About this title

About the Author

Beatrix Hoffman is professor of history at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of Health Care for Some: Rights and Rationing in the United States since 1930 and The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America.

 

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022610219X
• ISBN 13: 9780226102191
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 319