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

Jacob (Contact via Paul Price at the SSRC (pricep@ssrc.org).) Hacker

ISBN 10: 0231146027 / ISBN 13: 9780231146029

Published by Columbia University Press Nov 2008, 2008

About this Item

Neuware - The early twenty-first century is witnessing a concerted effort to privatize risk-to shift responsibility for the management or mitigation of key risks onto private-sector organizations or directly onto individuals. Proposals to reform Social Security through the creation of private accounts are perhaps the leading example, but in a wide range of areas, similar trends are now playing out. Yet, ironically, pensions and other private systems for responding to risk also face severe challenges-and often for the same reason that public systems do: the risks that characterize our society and economy have changed more rapidly than the institutions designed to deal with them. From the burdens on pension funds caused by population aging to the pressures on corporate and government health programs created by rapidly rising medical costs, the institutions of risk management are increasingly buffeted by new and intensified pressures that are reshaping how all of us experience and deal with risk.

Seller Inventory # 9780231146029

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Health at Risk : America's Ailing Health System and How to Heal It
• Publisher: Columbia University Press Nov 2008
• Publication Date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0231146027
• ISBN 13: 9780231146029
• Binding: Buch
• Condition: Neu
• Dimensions: 210W x 140H x 0D millimeters 210 millimeters width by 140 millimeters height by 0 millimeters depth
• Weight: 295 grams

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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"