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.
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A simple plan for efficient and universal healthcare