Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past forty years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency-and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. This second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise details a better approach, offering fundamental reform alternatives centering on tax changes, insurance market changes, and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid.The book proposes five specific reforms to improve the ability of markets to create a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system that is responsive to the needs of individuals, including increasing individual involvement, deregulating insurance markets and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid, improving availability and quality of information, enhancing competition, and reforming the malpractice system. The authors show that, by promoting cost-conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending.

Mutual funds form the bedrock of retirement savings in the United States, and, considering their rapid growth, are sure to be more critical in the future. Because the size of fees paid by investors to mutual fund advisers can strongly affect the return on investment, these fees have become a contentious issue in Congress and the courts, with many arguing that investment advisers grow rich at the expense of investors.

This ground-breaking book not only conceptualizes a new economic model of the mutual fund industry, but also uses this model to test for price competition between investment advisers, evaluating the assertion that market forces fail to protect investors' returns from excessive fees. Highly experienced authors track the growth of the industry over the past twenty-five years and present arguments and evidence both for and against theories of adviser malfeasance. The authors review the regulatory history of mutual fund fees and summarize leading case decisions addressing excessive fees.

Revealing the extent to which the governance structure of mutual funds truly impacts fund performance, this book provides the best understanding of today's mutual fund industry and is a vital tool for investors, money managers, fund directors, securities lawyers, economists, and anyone concerned with the regulation of mutual funds.

Over the past twenty years more citizens in China and India have raised themselves out of poverty than anywhere else at any time in history. They accomplished this through the local business sector--the leading source of prosperity for all rich countries. In most of Africa and other poor regions the business sector is weak, but foreign aid continues to fund government and NGOs. Switching aid to the local business sector in order to cultivate a middle class is the oldest, surest, and only way to eliminate poverty in poor countries.

A bold fusion of ethics and smart business, "The Aid Trap" shows how the same energy, goodwill, and money that we devote to charity can help local business thrive. R. Glenn Hubbard and William Duggan, two leading scholars in business and finance, demonstrate that by diverting a major share of charitable aid into the local business sector of poor countries, citizens can take the lead in the growth of their own economies. Although the aid system supports noble goals, a local well-digging company cannot compete with a foreign charity that digs wells for free. By investing in that local company a sustainable system of development can take root.

The authors of this volume challenge the common perception that the removal of old distortions from the tax system would seriously hurt segments of the economy.

This text examines how firms change their investment decisions in response to tax policy and concludes that firms would substantially increase their investment in plant and equipment if some of the proposals for fundamental tax reform are enacted.

This work examines the efficiency, fairness, and administrative consequences of leading proposals for income tax reforms in the USA.