Discusses successful health-care systems worldwide, disproving American myths of "socialized medicine" to find possible paths toward reform.

"A citizen's guide to America's most debated policy-in-waiting. There are few issues as consequential in the lives of Americans as health care--and few issues more politically vexing. Every single American will interact with the health care system at some point in their lives, and most people will find that interaction less than satisfactory. And yet for every dollar spent in our economy, 19 cents go to health care. What are we paying for, exactly?...

"Health care is the largest employer in America, one of the largest perceived drains on the budget of the Federal government, a system with the capacity to bankrupt entire state economies, and one of the areas of personal expenditure that gives individual American citizens most financial anxiety. It matters like almost no other dimension of the government and private sector. Yet the system is widely misunderstood, and is a confusing maze to most of...

A report on the failures of America's medical system is told through the experiences of its victims, from a worker whose wife died from cancer after his employer stopped providing insurance, to a disabled infant's mother who fought to get therapy coverage.

"From a MacArthur Genius MIT economist and pre-eminent Stanford economist comes a lively and provocative proposal for American health insurance reform/" -- Amazon.com. "A lively and provocative proposal for American health care reform"-- Provided by publisher.

A doctor and a leading thinker in healthcare reform describes what he believes medical care will look like in the future and outlines the 12 key practices required for physicians, doctor offices and hospitals to evolve and provide excellent patient care. -- Publisher's description.

Publisher's description: Why, alone among industrial democracies, does the United States not have national health insurance? While many books have addressed this question, Dead on Arrival is the first to do so based on original archival research for the full sweep of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of political, reform, business, and labor records, Colin Gordon traces a complex and interwoven story of political failure and private response....

Why is more than $1 trillion-- one out of every three dollars that passes through the American health care system-- lost to fraud, wasted on services that don't help patients, or misspent? Silver and Hyman reveal a system that performs as if it had been designed to spend as much money as it can, and to be as confusing and unfriendly as possible, with no accountability. They detail real reforms, showing how health care can become more efficient and...