During the twentieth century, the issue of health care burst out of the private confines of the physician's office to become a monumental contentious social issue. Giant multinational corporations scooped up proprietary hospitals and nursing homes and assembled them into vast chains crisscrossing America. The incomes of entrepreneurial fee-for-serv

The private health insurance industry is unable to provide nearly 40 million Americans with basic health care. Relying on data from a wide range of publications about this secretive industry, Lawrence D. Weiss investigates the causes of the industry's problems and analyzes the social effects of the growing crisis. The causes include excessive overhead costs, widespread inefficiency, and exemptions from antimonopoly regulations; the social effects include small businesses' inabilities to provide adequate coverage for their employees, the reluctance of many carriers to insure certain social groups, and the disproportionate burden on minorities. Addressing these dilemmas, Lawrence D. Weiss offers a timely and important analysis of the health insurance crisis in America.

During the twentieth century, the issue of health care burst out of the private confines of the physician's office to become a monumental contentious social issue. Giant multinational corporations scooped up proprietary hospitals and nursing homes and assembled them into vast chains crisscrossing America. The incomes of entrepreneurial fee-for-service physicians grew several times faster than the rate of inflation year after year, while the cost of health care swelled to consume 14 percent of the gross domestic product and continues to climb higher. The government gingerly applied cost containment strategies while hospitals expanded capacity and filled multiple "profit centers" with expensive high-tech equipment. Health care administration emerged as the fastest growing segment of all health-related occupations.Meanwhile, infant mortality in the United States is increasingly excessive compared with other industrialized countries, and the gulf of health status disparities between white Americans and minorities soars. Tens of thousands of Americans each year die from complications due to unnecessary but profitable surgeries, while millions suffer from medical neglect because they cannot pay for health care. The cost of malpractice insurance skyrockets while the fraternity of physicians pretend to discipline one another.Health care is a nation-wide problem, and the social devastation in its wake is a tragedy of national scope. Existing assumptions, power structures, political and economic interests, and social organizations have contributed to the crisis. In "Private Medicine and Public Health, " Lawrence Weiss dispassionately questions and analyzes the many issues of the health care crisis in search of much-needed solutions.

This book offers a timely and important analysis of the health insurance crisis in America. Relying on data from a wide range of publications about the health insurance industry, it investigates the causes of the industry's problems and analyzes the social effects of the growing crisis.