"Health Care Reform: What It Is, Why It's Necessary, How It Works is a deeply informed, opinionated, immediately accessible explanation of why health care reform is essential, why the legislation Congress passed is our best bet for solving the problem, and why it would be disastrous if we revoked it. Poll after poll shows that the majority of Americans are against health care reform. Polls also show that the majority of American's simply do not understand what is at stake, how reform works, and what its immediate and long-term consequences will be. Health Care Reform explains the stakes, means, and consequences with the immediacy of comics and the authority that only Jonathan Gruber can bring. And with Nathan Schreibers' illustrations using a visual style reminiscent of the political cartoons of Thomas Nash and Walt Kelly, the book will leave no one in doubt: Americans can no longer afford to be ignorant of the facts. Few experts know more about America's dire need of health care reform than Gruber. And of that short list, he is the only one prepared to enter the pages of a comic book to make the case. To be clear: Gruber is not an expert; he is the expert. An award-winning MIT economist and the director of the Health Care Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, he was a key architect of the ambitious health care reform effort in Massachusetts and is a member of the Health Connector Board now implementing it; in 2006 he was named by Modern Healthcare as the nineteenth most powerful person in health care in the United States. In 2008 he was a consultant to the Clinton, Edwards, and Obama presidential campaigns. The national legislation passed by Congress in 2009 derives directly from Grubers' insights learned during the Massachusetts health care debate"--Provided by publisher.

In this sure-to-be-controversial book, leading management thinker Henry Mintzberg turns his attention to reframing the management and organization of health care. The problem is not management per se but a form of remote-control management detached from the operations yet determined to control them. It reorganizes relentlessly, measures like mad, promotes a heroic form of leadership, favors competition where the need for cooperation, and pretends that the calling of health care should be managed like a business. This professional form of organizing is the source of health care's great strength as well as its debilitating weakness. In its administration, as in its operations, it categorizes whatever it can to apply standardized practices whose results can be measured. When the categories fit, this works wonderfully well. The physician diagnoses appendicitis and operates; some administrator ticks the appropriate box and pays. But when happens when the fit fails - when patients fall outside the categories or across several categories or need to be treated as people beneath the categories? To cope with all this, Mintzberg says that we need to reorganize our heads instead of our institutions. He discusses how we can think differently about systems and strategies, sectors and scale, measurement and management, leadership and organization, competition and collaboration. The overall message of Mintzberg's masterful analysis is that care, cure, control, and community have to work together, within health-care institutions and across them, to deliver quantity, quality, and equality simultaneously. -- from back cover.

"In her foreword to Science Next, Elizabeth Edwards wrote of science as a tool for social progress: "Innovation is not simply the abstract victory of knowledge [or] the research that gave me years to live; the next science can advance human flourishing and serve the common good. That's the kind of world I want to leave for my children, and for yours." With these words, she joined a tradition that goes back to America's founders, who saw America itself as a "great experiment." Yet while no one can deny that science undergirds the American Dream, it has long been fertile terrain for the "culture wars." Along with arguing the pros and cons of abortion and healthcare, policymakers must now grapple with advancements that raise questions about what it means to be human: we've decoded the genome, but should we modify it to enhance certain "desirable" traits? If we can, should we prolong life at any cost? Will we soon be counting robots, cyborgs, and chimeras among our friends and family?The first book to unpack our love/hate relationship with science from our country's origins to today, The Body Politic is essential reading for science buffs and concerned citizens alike.Jonathan D. Moreno is editor of the Center for American Progress' online magazine Science Progress and professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Author and editor of many seminal books and articles on science and science policy, he divides his time between Philadelphia, PA, and Washington, DC"--

In this volume, the nation's leading advisors on health policy and financing appraise America's ailing healthcare system and suggest reasonable approaches to its rehabilitation. Each chapter confronts a major challenge to the country's health security, from runaway costs and uneven quality of care to declining levels of insurance coverage, medical bankruptcy, and the growing enthusiasm for health plans that put patients in charge of risk and cost. Bringing the latest research to bear on these issues, contributors diagnose the problems of our present system and offer treatments grounded in extensive experience. Free of bias and rhetoric, Health at Risk is an invaluable tool for those who are concerned with the current state of healthcare and are eager to effect change.

How involved should the government be in American healthcare? Ronald Hamowy argues that to answer this pressing question, we must understand the genesis of the five main federal agencies charged with responsibility for our health: the Public Health Service, the Food and Drug Administration, the Veterans Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and Medicare. In examining these, he traces the growth of federal influence from its tentative beginnings in 1798 through the ambitious infrastructures of today - and offers startling insights on the current debate. The author contends that until the twentieth century, governmental involvement in health care policy was nominal. With the sweeping food and drug reforms of 1906 and the Medicare amendments to Social Security in 1965, a whole new system of health care was brought to the American public. A careful analysis of the various programs generated by this legislation, however, shows a different picture of pet projects, budgetary lobbying, competitive bureaucracy and discord between the agencies and their opposition. Government and Public Health in America provides an illuminating look at the complicated forces that created these institutions and provokes discussion about their usefulness in the future. Hamowy's thoroughly researched analysis fills a substantial gap in the history of health policy. Economists, political scientists, historians, sociologists and health professionals concerned with the interface between government and health care will find much to recommend in this highly readable account of a fascinating topic.