FADS, FALLACIES AND FOOLISHNESS IN MEDICAL CARE MANAGEMENT AND POLICY

Thông tin sách: FADS, FALLACIES AND FOOLISHNESS IN MEDICAL CARE MANAGEMENT AND POLICY (Hardcover, 172 trang) – World Scientific Publishing Company, 2007. Ngôn ngữ: Tiếng Anh.

This collection of articles takes up a key set of what the author regards as particularly misleading fads and fashions developments that produce a startling degree of foolishness in contemporary discussions of how to organize, deliver, finance, pay for and regulate medical care services in modern industrial democracies. The policy fads addressed include the celebration of explicit rationing as a major cost control instrument, the belief in a "basic package" of health insurance benefits to constrain costs, the faith that contemporary cross-national research can deliver a large number of transferable models, and the notion that broadening the definition of what is meant by health will constitute some sort of useful advance in practice. Review This latest collection of essays is a buoyant and welcome antidote to the historically amnesiac, often po-faced and `politically correct' faddist tendency in health policy ... One of Marmor's most invaluable themes in the book concerns how `market solutions' in healthcare depend upon `perfect' conditions -- not just the technical prerequisites stipulated by neo-classical economists for competition in markets, but the political conditions which allow markets to function as intended. Review Marmor, one of the most original analysts of public policy and health systems, both nationally and internationally, has brought together some of his most perceptive articles. His insights are astute and seldom predictable. Book Description Marmor's deep appreciation of the political base of health policy -- in values, interests and institutions -- has made him a trenchant and eloquent critic of attempts to develop and promulgate universally applicable solutions to the fundamental challenges in this arena. Written over the past seven years, the essays compiled in this short book draw on his four decades of experience, research and reflection, and represent a fine distillation of the best of his critiques. They make salutory reading for practitioners and students of health policy alike. About the Author Ted Marmor began his public career as a special assistant to Wilbur Cohen (Secretary of HEW) in the mid-1960s. He was associate dean of Minnesota's School of Public Affairs, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the head of Yale's Center for Health Services, a member of President Carter's Commission on the National Agenda in the 1980s, and a senior social policy advisor to Walter Mondale in the Presidential campaign of 1984. He has testified before Congress about medical care reform, social security, and welfare issues, as well as being a consultant to government and non-profit agencies such as the US Department of Health and Human Services, Congressional Committee on Ways and Means, President's Commission on Income Maintenance, National Institute for Mental Health, and The Ford Foundation. Marmor's scholarship primarily concerns the politics of welfare state policy disputes in North America and Western Europe. He has particularly emphasized the major spending programs, which is reflected in the second edition of The Politics of Medicare (Aldine de Gruyter, 2000) and written a book with colleagues Mashaw and Harvey in the early l990s, America's Misunderstood Welfare State (Basic Books, l992). As author or co-author of eleven books, Marmor has also published over a hundred articles in a wide range of scholarly journals, as well as being a frequent op-ed contributor to US and Canadian newspapers. Marmor lectures frequently on health policy, management issues, and law to both management and law students. He has been an expert witness in cases ranging from the constitutionality of the Canada Health Act to mass tort asbestos. He has also been a commentator on a variety of television and radio programs.