Health at Risk: America s Ailing Health System?and How to Heal It

In this volume, the nation's leading advisors on health policy and financing appraise America's ailing healthcare system and suggest reasonable approaches to its rehabilitation. Each chapter confronts a major challenge to the country's health security, from runaway costs and uneven quality of care to declining levels of insurance coverage, medical bankruptcy, and the growing enthusiasm for health plans that put patients in charge of risk and cost. Bringing the latest research to bear on these issues, contributors diagnose the problems of our present system and offer treatments grounded in extensive experience. Free of bias and rhetoric, Health at Risk is an invaluable tool for those who are concerned with the current state of healthcare and are eager to effect change.

Jacob Hacker is professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, where he heads the Center on Health and Economic Security at the Boalt Law School. A frequent media commentator and author of numerous scholarly and popular articles, he is the author of four books, most recently The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. Contributors: Jacob Hacker: "Health Insecurity and the Middle Class"; Elizabeth McGlynn and David Meltzer: "Health Quality"; Brandon McKelvey and Jill Quadagno: "The Transformation of American Health Insurance"; Katherine Swartz: "The Uninsured and Underinsured"; Elizabeth Warren: "Medical Bankruptcy"