Health Care Reform Now! A Prescription for Change

Hardcover: 384 pages
ISBN 0787997528
978-0787997526
Jossey-Bass
August 2007
(click the button below for the very best currently available price for this important title)

The United States spends more money on health care by far than any other country and yet nearly 50,000,000 Americans are uninsured at least part of the time each year.

Health Care Reform Now! is written for anyone who cares enough about our health care situation to consider serious alternatives to the current system.

In this book George Halvorson—an internationally known health care leader and author—offers a sensible approach to health care reform and universal coverage that can work for all stakeholders. Step by step, George Halvorson outlines a game plan for a truly world-class health care system that will appeal to policy makers on both ends of the political spectrum and will deliver health care with improved quality, better access, provider accountability, performance transparency, consumer choice, and individual empowerment.

As readable as it is instructive, Health Care Reform Now! proposes a practical model that solves the unsolvable by identifying specific areas where health care performance can create better outcomes, better choices, and far better use of the health care dollar. Topics covered include:

A Few Hard but Useful Truths.
Data: The Missing Link for Health Care Reform.
What Do We Do Until the EMR Arrives?
Basic Steps to Improve Care for Chronic Disease Patients.
Eight Developments That Finally Make Health Care Reform Possible.
Making the Market Work for Health Care.
A New Idea: The Infrastructure Vendor.
Who Should We Hire to Reform Our Health Care Infrastructure?
Next Steps and Expectations.
Cost Shift Realities.
Universal Coverage Now!
So What Should We Do Now?

Halvorson explains why "reform" itself needs to be a "product" rather than just a concept. He also explains why quick action is essential and how using the right tools—the focus on real costs and the use of real data and better caregiver support systems—can make universal coverage easy to administer, efficient, affordable, and "free" in three years—compared to what the total cost of care would be without universal coverage.

"We don't really have a health care delivery system in this country. We have an expensive plethora of uncoordinated, unlinked, economically segregated, operationally limited micro systems, each performing in ways that too often create suboptimal performance both for the overall health care infrastructure and for individual patients." —from the Introduction

"George Halvorson convincingly argues that the United States finally has what it needs to make universal coverage a reality and lays out a plan to get us there. It should be required reading on Capitol Hill." —Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), chairman, Ways and Means Health Subcommittee

"George Halvorson's timing couldn't be better. This is a book that everyone who is searching for solutions should read." —Helen Darling, president, National Business Group on Health

"Halvorson's comprehensive approach, rooted in a practical understanding of the complexities of American health care, helps us focus on what matters." —Ian Morrison, Ph.D., health care futurist and author, Health Care in the New Millennium

"This book is powerful and compelling. It's just the right book for this time." —Jeffrey C. McGuiness, president, HR Policy Association

George Halvorson, is chairman and CEO of Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Hospitals, Oakland, California. He was president and CEO of HealthPartners in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

"Health care is not just another commodity. It is not a gift to be rationed based on the ability to pay." —Sen. Edward M. Kennedy

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