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February 15, 2004
Your Money or Your Life
Author: David Cutler, Harvard University
ISBN: 0195160428
Publisher: Oxford University Press
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. The common, and accurate, message to the public is that medical care is in crisis. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well.
David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's healthcare task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley, addresses these issues in "Your Money or Your Life," a new book published by Oxford University Press. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues 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 generates benefits in excess of the costs -- and that the United States could improve welfare further by increasing spending. Additionally, 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. He asserts that everyone must be insured for the medical system to perform well, and that payments should be based on quality, not just on the volume or technical complexity, of the services provided.
Lively and compelling, Your Money or Your Life offers a realistic yet rigorous economic approach to reforming healthcare--one that should prove to be a significant contributor toward breaking the stalemate of failed reform.
Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/Economics/Health/
176 pages; 3 line illus.; Feb 2004, ISBN 0195160428
