Americans have benefited from substantial improvements in health
since the end of World War II. They live longer and grow taller;
they have the safest and cheapest food supply on the planet; they
have seen virtually all childhood diseases brought under control.
Yet concerns about health remain widespread today. Cancer seems to
be everywhere; autoimmune, nervous, and environmental diseases have
reached pandemic proportions; medical malpractice suits have
proliferated.
How can we have received so many benefits while still being as
worried as ever about our health and the health care system
established to ensure and extend those benefits? The historical
perspective provided by the essays in this volume helps answer this
question by identifying two points of significant change in health
care policy. Beginning in the 1950s there emerged a subtle yet
critical reconceptualization as the individual rather than the
group came to figure prominently as the central policy-making unit.
Then in the late 1960s a palpable sense of limits rendered the
individualism of the previous decade into a Malthusian formulation:
the greater the access or benefits that any one person received,
the less others could get. Besides tracing these patterns in health
care development, the essays also show how traditional notions of
expertise have been affected by the changes. Contributors are Amy
Sue Bix, Hamilton Cravens, Gerald N. Grob, Alan I Marcus, Diane
Paul, David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz, and James Harvey
Young.
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