Unaffordable: American Healthcare from Johnson to Trump (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780299314101)

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.

Author: Jonathan Engel
ISBN-10: 0299314103
ISBN-13: 9780299314101
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
Language: English
Published: 02/20/2018
Pages: 296
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.90d

Review Citation(s):
Foreword 02/26/2018
Choice 10/01/2018