Unaffordable : American healthcare from Johnson to Trump / Jonathan Engel.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Engel, Jonathan, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical policy--United States--History--20th century.

Medical policy.

Medical policy--United States--History--21st century.

Medical care--United States--History--20th century.

Medical care.

Medical care--United States--History--21st century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Madison, Wisconsin : University of Wisconsin Press, [2018]

Summary:

Written for nonexperts, this is a brisk, engaging history of American healthcare from the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the 2010s. Step by step, Jonathan Engel shows how we arrived at our present convoluted situation, where generic drugs prices can jump 1, 000 percent in a day and primary care physicians can lose 20 percent of their income at the stroke of a Congressional pen. Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.

Contents:

Intro

Contents

Timeline of Major Federal Legislation

Introduction

1. A System Run Amok

2. Medical Free Markets

3. Reining in the Excess

4. The Lure of Profits

5. Efforts to Rationalize

6. HillaryCare

7. Managing Care

8. Quantity and Quality

9. Ethical Wrangling

10. Medicare and Medicaid: Evolving Government Programs

11. (Un)Affordable Care

12. Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index.

Notes:

Description based on print version record.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (EBook Central, viewed July 17, 2025).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780299314132

0299314138

OCLC:

1018944960