Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System

Ensuring America's Health explains why the US health care system offers world-class medical services to some patients but is also exceedingly costly with fragmented care, poor distribution, and increasingly bureaucratized processes. Based on exhaustive historical research, this work traces how public and private power merged to favor a distinctive economic model that places insurance companies at the center of the system, where they both finance and oversee medical care. Although the insurance company model was created during the 1930s, it continues to drive health care cost and quality problems today. This wide-ranging work not only evaluates the overarching political and economic framework of the medical system but also provides rich narrative detail, examining the political dramas, corporate maneuverings, and forceful personalities that created American health care as we know it. This book breaks new ground in the fields of health care history, organizational studies, and American political economy.

• The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
• Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care
• Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much For Health Care
• Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities (The MIT Press)
• The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
• Prescription for the Future: The Twelve Transformational Practices of Highly Effective Medical Organizations
• Origins of American Health Insurance: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds (Yale Series in Economic and Financial History)
• An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business and How You Can Take It Back
• Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
• The Inclusive Economy: How to Bring Wealth to America's Poor