Close to 50 million uninsured…steeply rising insurance premiums…employers cutting healthcare benefits….
There's plenty wrong with this picture. In Disease, Diagnoses, and Dollars: Facing the Ever-Expanding Market for Medical Care, public health expert Robert Kaplan takes America's healthcare industry to task and challenges readers to examine their own roles in it.
Provocative, timely, and comprehensively researched, this book analyzes the current healthcare crisis in terms of medical culture, economics and advertising. The findings reveal a system fraught with conflicts − contradictory healthcare policies, providers who over-test and over-prescribe, patients with unrealistic demands fueled by the media − and throughout, an absence of accountability.
Much of preventive medicine, Kaplan persuasively argues, comes down to the selling of expensive pills and procedures that drive up costs while subjecting the population to unneeded risks and complications. And the end result, he argues, is excess care for many people, and a dearth of care for many more.
Kaplan's informed, practical, and constructive approach makes Disease, Diagnoses, and Dollars a "must-read" for policymakers and professionals in public health and healthcare, business owners and ordinary citizens as well as consumers concerned with the viability of healthcare in America.
Robert Kaplan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Health Services in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author or co-author of more than 15 books and approximately 400 articles or chapters. The ISI includes him in the listing of the most cited authors in the world, defined as above the 99.5th percentile.
Robert M. Kaplan
Disease, Diagnoses, and Dollars
Facing the Ever-Expanding Market for Medical Care
2009, XVIII, 190 p., 81 illus.
Hardcover EUR 19.95, £15.00, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-387-74044-7