Health of the Nation; Health of the Planet: Medical Priorities and Supply-side Controls
Policy makers not only seek to make baseline health care available to everyone, but are asked to determine what kinds of medical needs should be given priority. Great Britain has been making what are essentially rationing decisions for decades, spen...
Age Happens: Increase in Life Expectancy
For years, scientific research on aging focused only on its negative aspects. But improved medical care and extensive public health programs have dramatically increased the average human lifespan. Aging and dying, like many aspects of our health, ar...
What Price?: Emergence and Impact of managed Care, The
The fact that most medical expenditures are paid by health insurance often blinds us to the actual costs of medical care. Despite the initiation of cost-saving measures known as "managed care" in the mid 1980s the cost of health insurance continues ...
What Price?: Factors Contributing to Rising Cost of Healthcare
Why have healthcare costs risen so precipitously? For one thing, the medical scene itself has changed, as Dr. William Schwartz, author of The Painful Prescription remembers. In the 1950s health-related expenditures comprised 5 percent or less of gro...
What Price?: Healthcare Dilemma: Do Other Nations Have the Answer?, The
Are there approaches to health care or decision-making models other countries use that might prove helpful? Dr. William Schwartz comments on the results of his investigation of the British healthcare system. From an international perspective, most c...
What Price?: Staggering Costs of Healthcare in the United States
The figures are staggering. Forty-four million people in the United States are not covered by health insurance of any kind; two-thirds of the unprotected are children. At the same time costs for even simple tests and procedures are rising at an alar...
The Fabric of Health: Health Comparisons, the United States and Other Industrialized Nations
The United States is in the bottom quartile of industrialized countries in standard statistical and public health measures. The healthcare emphasis in the U.S. generally improves quality of life but not life expectancy. Infant mortality tends to be ...