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Books
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Do Not Resuscitate
Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying and How We Must Replace It
by John Geyman
The raging debate over how to pay for health insurance has missed a profoundly important fact: As big as it is, as tight of a grip it has on American life, the health insurance industry is dying," states John Geyman, M.D. in Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry is Dying and How We Must Replace It.
Written for lay readers, health care professionals and policymakers alike, Do Not Resuscitate moves beyond books that decry our current problems to reveal what the trend for more than half a century of increasing costs and decreasing coverage really means. The situation for doctors, patients, caregivers and even the insured will move from dysfunctional to a complete breakdown over the next decade. In one of many examples Geyman cites, as employers cut costs in a global economy, the cost of health insurance as a proportion of wages is rising to the point where it will consume all average household income by 2025.
Building on his previous critiques of the medical profession and of the privatization of Medicare, Dr. Geyman dissects the collusion of forces from greed to cut-throat competition. Geyman shows that, combined with incremental reforms that hold the financing system in place, the health insurance industry is a ticking time bomb.
But under the worsening situation lies an opportunity, Geyman argues, to move beyond private health insurance to a single payer system that insures everyone. Do Not Resuscitate provides a roadmap for creating opportunity in the crisis.
http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=396
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10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care
Edited by Mary O’Brien and Martha Livingston
Health care is not just another commodity. It is not a gift to be rationed based on the ability to pay.
—SENATOR EDWARD M. KENNEDY (D-MA)
The United States spends twice as much as other industrialized nations on health care, yet our system performs poorly in comparison and still leaves 46 million without health coverage and millions more inadequately covered.
Imagine a health care program that is publicly funded and covers all basic medical services from doctor visits, hospitalization, and long-term care to prescription drugs, dental care, and mental health. 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care offers an array of powerful arguments for why and how this could become a reality. With fact-filled chapters written by leading physicians, health care professionals, policy makers, business-people, labor organizers, and others, this book shows how a national health care system is simpler, more inclusive, saves money, is good for business, will reduce health care disparities, and is a fundamental human right.
In time for the 2008 elections and following on the heels of Michael Moore’s Sicko, 10 Excellent Reasons for National Health Care offers powerful ammunition in favor of a fundamental change to American health care—and shows how we really can develop a comprehensive national health program for the United States.
http://www.pnhp.org/news/2008/september/10_excellent_reasons.php
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Toward a Healthy Society
by Milton Fisk
Skillfully blending philosophy, economics, and public policy, Fisk's book breaks new ground in political morality and raises important questions about the way people's needs for health care are being defined to satisfy corporate priorities. At a time when so many Americans can barely afford to get sick, no one concerned with this issue can afford to ignore this work of realism and vision.
"The best book on health care reform in the last decade--philosophically deep, politically astute, and legally fascinating. Fisk makes his case for reform cogently and in a manner that is fair-minded, reasonable, and eminently respectful of the different voices that speak within a multicultural democracy. This superb original analysis of U.S. 'corporate' medicine will be very useful."--Rosemarie Tong, author of Controlling Our Reproductive Destiny and Feminist Approaches to Bioethics.
Hardcover: 294 pages
Publisher: University Press of Kansas (April 2000)
ISBN: 0700610146
Buy this book at: Barns and Noble
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The Truth About the Drug Companies
by Marcia Angell, MD ( former editor of the New Endland Journal of Medicine), Random House, 2004.....very revealing analysis of big pharmaceuticals, their research efforts, marketing practices, politics.....a strong indictment of the industry.
Buy this book at: Barns and Noble
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Falling Though the Safety Net
by Dr. John Geyman
FROM THE PUBLISHER
In this stunning mixture of real life stories and cold-eyed analysis, Geyman brings you close up to the perils faced by every American. With nearly all Americans facing a lack of health insurance at some point, this is a book for you.
To those who would take the Alfred E. Newman stance toward health insurance (What me worry, I'm healthy!), Geyman delivers some sobering statistics:
Eighty percent of the uninsured live in working families;
Sixty-seven million Americans are uninsured for at least one month in a twenty-eight month period;
One in five workers cannot afford insurance when offered by employers;
Even in families with two full-time wage earners, ten percent are uninsured.
Those who lack insurance face poor health care and increased risk of bad outcomes. The answer, argues Dr. Geyman, is one the majority of Americans already want: single payer health insurance.
This is the book for those who no longer want this problem to be as American as apple pie.
John Geyman, M.D., is professor emeritus of Family -Medicine at the University of Washington, and editor of the Journal of the American Board of Family Practice.
Buy this book from Common Courage: Press http://www.commoncouragepress.com/index.cfm?action=book&bookid=254 for $12.32.
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Healthcare Meltdown
by Dr. Bob LeBow
FROM THE PUBLISHER
The pharmaceutical industry, the insurance companies, and the elite of the medical profession are doing their best to keep Americans clueless. They have created a whole mythology to keep us misinformed, to maintain their profitability, and to keep health care reform at bay.
Buy this book at: Powells Books
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Critical Condition
by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
FROM THE PUBLISHER
More than 100 million people with inadequate or no medical coverage...Dirty examination and operating rooms in doctors' offices and hospitals...Health care executives pulling in millions in bonuses for denying treatment to the sick...This may sound like the predicament of a third-world nation, but this is America's health care reality today. The United States spends more on health care than any other nation, yet our benefits are shrinking and life expectancy is shorter here than in countries that spend significantly less per capita. Meanwhile, HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, and hospital chains reap tremendous profits, while politicians - beholden to insurers and drug companies - enact legislation for the benefit of the few rather than the many, and the entire system is on the verge of collapse. In Critical Condition, award-winning investigative journalists Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele expose the horror of what health care in America has become. They profile patients and doctors trapped by the system and offer startling personal stories that illuminate what's gone wrong. Doctors tell of being second-guessed and undermined by health care insurers; nurses recount chilling tales of hospital meltdowns; patients explain how they've been victimized by a system that is meant to care for them. Drug companies profit by selling pills in the same manner that Madison Avenue sells soap, while Wall Street rakes in billions by building up and then tearing down health care businesses. And politicians pass legislation perpetuating the injustices and outright fraud the system encourages. By analyzing the industry and offering an insightful prescription for getting it back on the right track, Critical Condition is an enormously compelling investigative work that addresses the concerns of every American.
Buy this book:Barns and Noble
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