HSC 380 / POL 380: Health Care Policy
Prevention First by
In Prevention First, Dr. Anand K. Parekh, chief medical advisor of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues that disease prevention must be our nation's top health policy priority. Building a personal culture of prevention, he writes, is not enough; elected officials and policymakers must play a greater role in reducing preventable deaths. Drawing on his experiences as a clinician, public servant, and policy advisor, Dr. Parekh provides examples of prevention in action from across the country, giving readers a view into why prevention-first policies are important and how they can be accomplished. Throughout the book, he demonstrates that, in order to optimize health in America, we must leverage health insurance programs to promote disease prevention, expand primary care, attend to the social determinants of health, support making the healthier choice the easy choice for individuals, and increase public health investments. Describing the areas of common ground to be found in public health and prevention, even between the entrenched sides in the healthcare policy debate, Dr. Parekh establishes a foundation on which healthcare policy makers and advocates can build. Providing concrete steps that federal policymakers should take to promote prevention both within and outside our healthcare sector, Prevention First not only sounds the alarm about the terrible consequences of preventable disease but serves as a rallying cry that we can and must do better in this country to reduce preventable deaths.
Unaffordable by
Written for nonexperts, this is a brisk, engaging history of American healthcare from the advent of Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s to the impact of the Affordable Care Act in the 2010s. Step by step, Jonathan Engel shows how we arrived at our present convoluted situation, where generic drugs prices can jump 1,000 percent in a day and primary care physicians can lose 20 percent of their income at the stroke of a Congressional pen. Unaffordable covers, in a conversational style punctuated by apt examples, topics ranging from health insurance, pharmaceutical pricing, and physician training to health maintenance organizations and hospital networks. Along the way, Engel introduces approaches that other nations have taken in organizing and paying for healthcare and offers insights on ethical quandaries around end-of-life decisions, neonatal care, life-sustaining treatments, and the limits of our ability to define death. While describing the political origins of many of the federal and state laws that govern our healthcare system today, he never loses sight of the impact that healthcare delivery has on our wallets and on the balance sheets of hospitals, doctors' offices, government agencies, and private companies.
The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare by
In The Battle for Veterans' Healthcare, award-winning author Suzanne Gordon takes us to the front lines of federal policymaking and healthcare delivery, as it affects eight million Americans whose military service makes them eligible for Veterans Health Administration (VHA) coverage. Gordon's collected dispatches provide insight and information too often missing from mainstream media reporting on the VHA and from Capitol Hill debates about its future. Drawing on interviews with veterans and their families, VHA staff and administrators, health care policy experts and Congressional decision makers, Gordon describes a federal agency under siege that nevertheless accomplishes its difficult mission of serving men and women injured, in myriad ways, while on active duty.
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