Health Policy Books

Redefining Health Care: Creating Value-Based Competition on Results

Michael E. Porter, Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg

Amazon Price: $23.10 List Price: $35.00 Usually ships in 24 hours By: Harvard Business School Press Amazon Marketplace: 74 new & used starting at $11.99

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The U.S. health care system is in crisis. At stake are the quality of care for millions of Americans and the financial well-being of individuals and employers squeezed by skyrocketing costs - not to mention the stability of state and federal government budgets. In "Redefining Health Care", internationally renowned strategy expert Michael E. Porter and innovation expert Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg reveal the underlying and largely overlooked causes of the problem and provide a powerful prescription for change. The authors argue that participants in the health care system have competed to shift costs, accumulate bargaining power, and restrict services rather than create value for patients. This zero-sum competition takes place at the wrong level - among health plans, networks, and hospitals - rather than where it matters most: in the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of specific health conditions. In spite of competition among these systems, the patient care cycle is poorly coordinated. The fractured system undermines both efficiency and quality of outcomes. "Redefining Health Care" lays out a breakthrough framework for redefining health care competition based on patient value over the full cycle of care - from prevention and diagnosis through recovery or long-term disease management. With specific recommendations for hospitals, doctors, health plans, employers, and policy makers, this book shows how to move to value-based competition on results that will unleash stunning improvements in quality and efficiency.

Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition, and Health, Revised and Expanded Edition (California Studies in Food and Culture)

Marion Nestle

Amazon Price: $11.53 List Price: $16.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: University of California Press Amazon Marketplace: 57 new & used starting at $8.95

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 38 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Good information in a dull format 3 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

Marion Nestle has a lot of useful and important information in this book; however, her style is very clinical and mundane. I found myself working to stay awake whenever I read the book. I did finish it, because I think it's good knowledge to have, but a better writer could have made the material pop.

The same people pushing to "empower individuals" do all they can to disempower you 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There's much to say about Nestle's "Food Politics" and "What To Eat," but the overarching message is that the food industries lie compulsively in order to maximize profits. There's no reason to assume that food-company profit maximization would lead to any desirable outcome: they will produce more food every year in the quest for profit growth, and that food will be as artificial and toxic as the laws will allow them. They will resist any food labeling that might harm their sales. This includes:

* "organic" (which implies that some foods are better than others)
* warnings about toxicity (e.g., methylmercury in tuna)
* the USDA food pyramid, which explicitly places junk food at the top and low-profit vegetables near the bottom

They offload the regulatory burden onto consumers: if you're getting fat, it's your own fault. Of course, they say this while they fight tooth and nail against any labeling requirement that might help you choose. And they fight against any regulation that might make you safer at their expense.

And of course there's the advertising. The same companies that tearfully demand your 'freedom to choose' with hand over heart are the same ones that target your children: everything from Saturday-morning cartoon ads to McDonald's sponsorship of Teletubbies to Coca-Cola branded baby bottles. In-depth psychological research understands exactly what will make your child tug at your sleeve in the grocery store and beg for the most profitable sugary cereal. So you have the 'freedom to choose', defended by companies that do all they can to deny it.

Marion Nestle's magisterial books prove these points in extraordinary detail, yet they pull off the trick with an eloquence that makes them read like novels. The basic premise, though, is beyond dispute: food companies exist to maximize shareholder return. Their investors demand growth every year. There's no reason to expect that this demand will work in your favor.

Editorial Review:

An accessible and balanced account, Food Politics laid the groundwork for today's food revolution and changed the way we respond to food industry marketing practices. Now, a new introduction and concluding chapter bring us up to date on the key events in that movement. This pathbreaking, prize-winning book helps us understand more clearly than ever before what we eat and why.

Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis

Tom Daschle

Amazon Price: $14.37 List Price: $23.95 Usually ships in 7 to 13 days By: Thomas Dunne Books Amazon Marketplace: 3 new & used starting at $14.37

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A much-needed and hard-hitting plan, from one of the great Democratic minds of our time, to reform America’s broken health-care system.

Undoubtedly, the biggest domestic policy issue in the coming years will be America’s health-care system.  Millions of Americans go without medical care because they can’t afford it, and many others are mired in debt because they can’t pay their medical bills. It’s hard to think of another public policy problem that has lingered unaddressed for so long. Why have we failed to solve a problem that is such a high priority for so many citizens?

      Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle believes the problem is rooted in the complexity of the health-care issue and the power of the interest groups—doctors, hospitals, insurers, drug companies, researchers, patient advocates—that have a direct stake in it. Rather than simply pointing out the major flaws and placing blame, Daschle offers key solutions and creates a blueprint for solving the crisis.

      Daschle’s solution lies in the Federal Reserve Board, which has overseen the equally complicated financial system with great success.  A Fed-like health board would offer a public framework within which a private health-care system can operate more effectively and efficiently—insulated from political pressure yet accountable to elected officials and the American people. Daschle argues that this independent board would create a single standard of care and exert tremendous influence on every other provider and payer, even those in the private sector.

      After decades of failed incremental measures, the American health-care system remains fundamentally broken and requires a comprehensive fix.  With his bold and forward-looking plan, Daschle points us to the solution.

Understanding Health Policy

Thomas S. Bodenheimer, Kevin Grumbach

List Price: $34.95 By: McGraw-Hill/Appleton & Lange Amazon Marketplace: 33 new & used starting at $1.40

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Already the number one text on health policy and rapidly becoming a classic, Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach 3E covers such fundamental topics as cost containment, health insurance, managed care, and physician and hospital payment. Extensive case histories, drawn from the authors' actual practice, bring to life important policy issues by pinpointing individual encounters within the healthcare system.

New to this Edition

* More information on 2-tier model of reimbursement
* Greater emphasis on defined contribution approach to controlling costs
* Includes comparative information on health care policy in Canada, the UK, and Germany
* "Questions & Discussion Topics" provided for each chapter to stimulate classroom discussion

Please consider this important new edition for your course. Your students will gain an engaging text, that according to a review by the Journal of Health, Politics, Policy, and Law of the prior edition, "goes a long way toward helping readers understand how the health care system has worked in the past, how it is changing, and how it might work under different scenarios in the future."

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels, and the Business of AIDS

Elizabeth Pisani

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A flame-throwing epidemiologist talks about sex, drugs, and the mistakes (dismal), ideologies (vicious), and hopes (realistic) of international AIDS prevention.

When people ask Elizabeth Pisani what she does for a living, she says, "sex and drugs." As an epidemiologist researching AIDS, she's been involved with international efforts to halt the disease for fourteen years. With swashbuckling wit and fierce honesty, she dishes on herself and her colleagues as they try to prod reluctant governments to fund HIV prevention for the people who need it most—drug injectors, gay men, sex workers, and johns.

Pisani chats with flamboyant Indonesian transsexuals about their boob jobs and watches Chinese streetwalkers turn away clients because their SUVs aren't nice enough. With verve and clarity, she shows the general reader how her profession really works; how easy it is to draw wrong conclusions from "objective" data; and, shockingly, how much money is spent so very badly. "Exhibit A": the 45 billion taxpayer dollars the Bush administration is committing to international AIDS programs. 12 illustrations.

The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care

Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman M.D., Jason Hwang M.D.

Amazon Price: $21.75 List Price: $32.95 Not yet published By: McGraw-Hill

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Editorial Review:

Clay Christensen's latest landmark in innovation

The celebrated Harvard professor and New York Times bestselling author tackles two of our most vital global issues: health care and innovation.

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In his brilliant and groundbreaking books-The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and Disrupting Class-Harvard Business School's Clayton Christensen has changed the way the world thinks about thinking and change. Now, with his co-authors, Dr. Jerome Grossman, a nationally recognized health care policy expert and former hospital CEO, and Dr. Jason Hwang, Executive Director of Health Care and co-founder of Innosight Institute, Christensen now applies his revolutionary principles to a broken system in dire need of innovation.

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Using cutting-edge technologies and consumer-driven alternatives, Christensen, Grossman, and Hwang show businesses, insurance companies, and health workers how to lower costs, improve care, and streamline the process, benefiting companies, doctors, and patients alike. This is real innovation at work, an eye-opening manifesto that's sure to spark international debate�and much-needed change�for generations to come.

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�Just as kids await the next Harry Potter installment, so do business leaders look for Clayton M. Christensen's next offering.�-Inc. magazine

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Last Well Person: How to Stay Well Despite the Health-care System

Nortin M. Hadler

Amazon Price: $31.96 List Price: $39.95 Usually ships in 24 hours By: McGill-Queen's University Press Amazon Marketplace: 19 new & used starting at $16.63

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Ignore your doctor but take care of yourself. 4 out of 5 stars.
5 of 5 people found this review helpful.

As a practicing physician I approached this book with some skepticism. Even though the reasoning is at time flawed and incomplete the essential message is clear. Physicians in the US have an intrinsic conflict of interest between making a living and healing patients. If interventional cardiologists and cardiac surgeons actually explained known risks and benefits of their procedures the cardiology "business" would collapse. The problem is that would require that the physicians actually understand the risks and benefits- which is rare.

Everyone should read this book then ask your physician tough questions about your healthcare.

Editorial Review:

Are we all diseased time bombs? In "The Last Well Person" Dr Nortin Hadler argues that unfounded assertions, massaged data, and flagrant marketing have led to the medicalization of everyday life. He systematically builds the case that constant medical monitoring and unnecessary intervention are hazards to our health, severely reducing our quality of life. Sick with worry, we are a culture panicked by many illnesses - cardio-vascular disease, obesity, adult onset diabetes, fatigue, and breast cancer. Especially insidious, contends Hadler, is the misuse of longevity statistics in turning the difficulties experienced through a natural course of life, such as aging, back pain, and osteoporosis, into illnesses. He shows that the medical profession's current notion that such predicaments can be avoided is fatuous and self-serving. And he argues that most heart bypass surgery, mammography, cholesterol screening, and treatment to prevent prostate cancer should be avoided.

Delivering Health Care in America: A Systems Approach

Leiyu Shi

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

A Systems Approach is not very systematic 1 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

This is one of the worst text books I have ever used for a course. The content is dense and difficult.
Chapters are not well outlined and don't follow sequence provided in text.

Too many inconsistencies in the data and materials. Chapter 12, page 524 says that the HEDIS quality review has 56 measures, the glossary says 71. This is only one of many I identified. I spotted far too many grammatical errors, incomplete sentences and more for a 3rd Edition book.

It is more than obvious that some updates have occured in certain sections but have not been rolled throughout the entire text. This textbook is in dire need of an overhaul and condensing. Major points are diluted with it's over-complicated verbiage, poor flow and lack of comprehensive outline.

Editorial Review:

In a clear, cohesive format, Delivering Health Care in America provides a comprehensive overview of the basic structures and operations of the US health system from its historical origins and resources, to its individual services, cost, and quality. Using a unique systems approach, it brings together an extraordinary breadth of information into a highly accessible, easy-to-read text that clarifies the complexities of health care organization and finance, while presenting a solid overview of how the various components fit together.

Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System

David M. Cutler

List Price: $26.00 By: Oxford University Press, USA Amazon Marketplace: 22 new & used starting at $3.99

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The problems of medical care confront us daily: a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. "Medical care is in crisis," we are repeatedly told, and so it is. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well.
Enter David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's health care task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues in Your Money or Your Life that health care has in fact improved exponentially over the last fifty years, and that the successes of our system suggest ways in which we might improve care, make the system easier to deal with, and extend coverage to all Americans. Cutler applies an economic analysis to show that our spending on medicine is well worth it--and that we could do even better by spending more. Further, millions of people with easily manageable diseases, from hypertension to depression to diabetes, receive either too much or too little care because of inefficiencies in the way we reimburse care, resulting in poor health and in some cases premature death.
The key to improving the system, Cutler argues, is to change the way we organize health care. Everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and payments should be based on the quality of services provided not just on the amount of cutting and poking performed.
Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming health care--one that promises to break through the stalemate of failed reform.

The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care

David Gratzer

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

The perfect antidote to Moore's Sicko propaganda 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 22 people found this review helpful.

Let me state now that NO ONE is denying that healthcare in the United States is messed up right now, and is facing some SERIOUS issues. Even the most conservative Republican knows this full well and good. This is not even the issue. The real issue should be: would socializing things make our problems better or worse?

Michael Moore, in Sicko, touts Canada's socialized healthcare system, even calling it "free." (It's not free. The government also does not "pay" for it because the government does NOT have any money. Taxpayers pay for it.) Moore is of course conveniently ignoring many well-known facts. The author of Cure was a Doctor in Canada, and saw first-hand the problem with socialized medicine. His book demonstrates that it's not all that it's cracked up to be. Sorry Hillary.

In England and Canada, if you go to the doctor or the hospital, you won't get a bill. Yeah that's great. But the problem that has emerged is that it takes SO LONG to even get in for certain types of treatment that people are DYING OF EASILY TREATABLE ILLNESSES THERE. In England this has gotten SO BAD that more people are dying a year of treatable cancer than from automobile accidents!!! Yes, that's right. The cancer WAS treatable, but by the time they actually get in for treatment, it has advanced to the stage that it no longer is treatable, and the patient dies.

So, if the healthcare in Canada is SO WONDERFUL, then why are so many Canadians flooding our Northern hospitals every year? They come across the border for an appointment they can get right away, when in their own country they would have to wait nine months to a year for treatment. As shown on 20/20, dogs and cats that need surgery in Canada get it faster than humans!

By the way, if you get strep throat and have to wait a month to even get in to see a general practitioner (which is about the typical wait for GPs in Canada), then what's even the point? You'll be better by the time you get in! So, depending on whether what you have is life-threatening or not, YOU'LL MAY EITHER BE BETTER OR UNCURABLE BY THE TIME YOU EVEN SEE A DOCTOR! Who cares if it's "free"? As the Canadian woman on the September 14th episode of 20/20 said who had to come to America for a life-saving surgery that the Canadian system classified as "elective surgery" (whereas the American doctor gave her only a couple weeks to live), "Who cares if they make a profit (in America), I'm alive!"

The wait to see dentists in England is so bad that people are now performing home dentistry. We're not talking teeth cleaning here, but people pulling their own teeth out instead of having professional work done! Lines to get into the dentist in England look like the lines did at the local theater on the opening night of Star Wars Episode III. No thank you!

By the way, if the government-run medical system in Canada is so great, then why does a private clinic now open in Canada EVERY WEEK, on average, even though such clinics ARE ILLEGAL? Furthermore, if these private clinics are illegal in Canada (and they are), then why does the Canadian government do nothing to stop them? BECAUSE THE CANADIAN GOVERNMENT KNOWS IT NEEDS THEM, THAT ITS HEALTHCARE SYSTEM IS CRUMBLING, THAT'S WHY. The prime minister of Canada recently suggested that their socialized healthcare system is on the brink of collapse, and Americans are scurrying to emulate it!

This book is a much-needed reality check after the overlong season of uncritical love surrounding Moore's obscurantist propaganda documentary. In fact, it's too bad this book isn't a documentary itself; it could then act as a more effective counterweight.

Editorial Review:

The American health care system is in crisis. Skyrocketing costs and increasing bureaucracy have traumatized consumers and doctors alike. In The Cure, Dr. David Gratzer brings a dose of common sense to this over-regulated area of the American economy.