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You are here > Home > Reading Lists > Healthcare Policy & Politics > The Brave New World of Health Care The Brave New World of Health Care Softcover Booklet: 144 pages The topics covered in this book include:
Excerpted from this book: "Public policy must consider the costs and benefits of all social needs and cannot exempt health care from scrutiny. Public policy cannot say, "I don’t care how much our actions raise your taxes or premiums." There must be limits that one person’s health demand can impose on his neighbor. Life is valuable, life has a very high value, but it cannot be priceless. Where is the moral high ground in a society that cannot disconnect feeding tubes to people in a persistent vegetative state but does not connect the working poor to basic health coverage? How can we allow such results as elderly patients with new hips or pacemakers dying from summer heat because they lack a fan in their room? How can the system pay for everything in allopathic medicine and nothing in other areas that advance health? Public policy doesn’t have the luxury of individual advocacy. It has to choose among many worthwhile civic goals. However, important medicine is to society, it does not have a monopoly on achieving health. The monomaniacal pursuit of health care can unknowingly interfere with the total health of society. "American expectations for health care over the last thirty years have been developed during the most massive transfer of wealth into one sector (health care) that history has ever seen. Economists worry that we are unbalancing our economy and that it’s not wise national policy to spend one dollar out of every seven dollars of our gross domestic product (GDP) on health care. Health care is a fiscal black hole into which we can pour all of our children’s future. Yet we are no healthier than many nations that spend far less, and we leave 43 million Americans uncovered by health insurance. Americans now spend on average approximately $5,500 per person on health care. Five thousand five hundred dollars is twice as much as the average. "American spends for all functions of state government and is more than the total yearly per capita income of over two-thirds of the world’s population. Because we spend more doesn’t mean we get more, nor does it mean we are spending this amount wisely. Social policy experts point out myriad other public needs that are under-funded, yet polls show that Americans regard health care as one of the most important priorities; most Americans want to spend more, not less, on health care. That is politically important, because in a democracy we generally get what we want, but is it wise public policy? Do we really know what we are doing?" Richard D. Lamm is the co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver and the former three-term governor of Colorado. A nationally recognized expert of healthcare issues, Lamm was chairman of the Pew Health Professions Commission and a public member of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. He is the author of numerous articles on healthcare which have appeared in such medical publications as The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), Health Affairs, Medical Economics, and Public Health Reports. His editorials have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune. Long a target of policymakers and reformers, the current American healthcare system is, in the words of Richard D. Lamm, "unsustainable, unaffordable, and inequitable, and needs to be substantially amended and revised." In this informed and erudite look at the current state of the American healthcare system, Lamm exposes the problems existing not only in policy and professional circles, but also in public attitudes and expectations. In so doing, Lamm provides a framework for reform, seeking to rebuild the "house of healthcare" that has fallen into disrepair. "...instructive and provocative guide through the best and worst of a national crisis." - Tom Brokaw, Anchor, NBC Nightly News "...a stark mirror up to an American society willing to steal from its children and bankrupt the next generation." - Gary Hart, Former United States Senator from Colorado "Dick Lamm asks those tough questions—and comes up with some answers." - Michael Dukakis. Former Governor of Massachusetts and Democratic Presidential Candidate If you are interested in policy or books about health care reform, please see our up-to-date collection here: Politics, Policy & Reform. 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