The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care [Paperback]

David Gratzer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 20, 2008

We are surrounded by medical miracles: polio has been eradicated; childhood leukemia is now treatable; death by cardiovascular disease has declined by two-thirds in the last fifty years. Yet while American medicine has never been better, angst over American health care has never been greater. Why is American health care such a mess? In this path-breaking book--Nobel laureate Milton Friedman calls it "fascinating and thorough"--Dr. David Gratzer goes to the heart of the problem, showing that the crisis in American health care stems largely from its addiction to outmoded and discredited economic ideas. What needs to be done? Dr. Gratzer mounts a bold and provocative argument, rejecting the conventional wisdom that socialized health care is compassionate and that top-down government agencies like the FDA actually save lives. Instead, he prescribes a strong dose of capitalism. The Cure offers a detailed overview of American health care, from economics and politics to medical science. Weighing in on the most controversial topics in health care, Dr. Gratzer makes the case that it's possible to reduce health expenses, insure millions more, and improve quality of care while not growing government or raising taxes. An award-winning author and essayist, he is a master storyteller, enlivening his book with anecdotes, interviews, and stories drawn from his own extensive clinical experience. He details the cardiac woes of Robert E. Lee and Dick Cheney, describes a chat over coffee with Canada's foremost private medical entrepreneur (an acquaintance of Fidel Castro, as it happens), and explains the evolution of his own thinking, from advocating HillaryCare as a medical student to promoting individual choice and competition today. The patient is in critical condition; Dr. Gratzer diagnoses the disease and prescribes the cure.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"David Gratzer is a practicing psychiatrist who combines firsthand knowledge of medical practice in both his native Canada and the U.S. with an independent point of view and a rare capacity for lucid exposition of complex technical material. . . If you want a well-written, interesting yet authoritative and thorough account of what is wrong with medicine today and how to cure American health care, this is the book for you."

- Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate, Economics (from foreword to The Cure)

"The Cure is a must read for all students of health care policy. Dr. Gratzer correctly diagnoses the U.S. health care system's problems and proposes workable solutions to fix them. His ideas will help reign-in costs while, at the same time, preserve necessary incentives for quality-of-life enhancing innovations."

--John F. Cogan, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"David Gratzer's well written book should be in the reading list of anyone interested in health care reform. In five-sixths of the U.S economy, we look to markets as an organizing mechanism; in the one-sixth of the economy represented by health care, public policy has frustrated markets, with adverse consequences for cost, access, and quality. Gratzer's capitalist manifesto is a shot in the arm; with it, the much that's right with American health care can grow."

--R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School; and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

"The caduceus is an apt symbol for medicine, given the bureaucratic snake pit the American health care system has become. Dr. David Gratzer skillfully wields Occam's razor to shave away the Byzantine rhetoric and show us that the cure for health care comes in the simplest of formulas - free markets, less government meddling, and a healthy dose of capitalism."

--Governor Bill Owens, Colorado

"Dr. David Gratzer is uniquely qualified to diagnose and provide a treatment regimen for the US health care system's problems. In this book he performs this function for us, does it with his usual acumen and clarity. He leads us by the hand through the labyrinth of legal, institutional and regulatory events that brought to the point where, at least to some, we are in a health crisis that can only be solved by further movement away from the market and toward a universal centrally controlled system. He thoroughly debunks the notion we can improve the US health care system by becoming more like our neighbors to the North. After taking us there, he shows us why these same legal, institutional, and regulatory events are largely responsible for our predicament and that the popular solution of more of the same is not the answer. He convincingly demonstrates that the only way out is less regulation of, and more freedom for, the providers and customers of health care. This book should be read by anyone involved, or with the hope or potential to be involved, in determining health care policy."

--Tom Saving, Director, Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University.

"Excellent addition to the emerging call for empowering patients rather than government bureaucrats with control of the health care dollar, written by someone with an expert view from the inside!"

--Scott W. Atlas, MD, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Dr. David Gratzer, a physician, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Public Interest, The Weekly Standard, National Review, and the L.A. Times. He is often quoted on health matters across North America. He was recently cited in the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as by such media as Fox News and the Kansas City Star. Dr. Gratzer is frequently invited to speak on health reform. He debated Congressman Gil Gutknecht on drug reimportation at the American Enterprise Institute, testified before Congress on the Health Care Choice Act, and keynoted the Long Island Health Care Summit after Senator Hillary Clinton cancelled because of a scheduling conflict. Other recent addresses include: the Couchiching Institute, the Canadian Medical Association, and the National Center for Policy Analysis. He is the author of Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System (ECW Press, 1999), which was awarded the $25,000 Donner Prize for best Canadian public policy book in 2000. Code Blue is now in its fifth printing. He is also the editor of Better Medicine (ECW Press, 2002), a collection of essays from leading health care thinkers in Canada, the United States, and Europe. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 250 pages
• Publisher: Encounter Books; 1 edition (March 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 159403219X
• ISBN-13: 978-1594032196
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #418,132 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

168 of 229 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Achieving the perfect orderliness of a soylent green society, July 12, 2009

By 

Gen. JC Christian, patriot (Tremonton, UT United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (Paperback)

David Gratzer's "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care" is perhaps greatest paen ever written to the one true religion: laissez-faire capitalism. It's a celebration of the triumph of the bottom line, an adoration of profit, and a joyous prayer of hope for the perfect orderliness of a soylent green society.

Over the last 30 years, we've stood in awe as we've witnessed unregulated capitalism's transformative powers. Where once our edible ecology lacked such keystone species as E.coli and salmonella, our meat, fruit, vegetables, and water have become veritable Edens for those precious pathogens. Where once financial regulation checked glorious greed and encouraged the unbearable ennui that comes with stability, our new, deregulated, economic environment has brought excitement to investing and incredible profits to those few deserving oligarchs who were most prepared with the connections to exploit the system to their advantage.

Now, David Gratzer and the insurance industry wants to do the same for health care. He's heard the complaints. He's read studies like the 2004 Commonwealth Fund report which looked at satisfaction in five nations. He saw that they found that U.S. Americans were by far the most dissatisfied with their health care system (over twice as dissatisfied as Canadians)and less likely to receive care because of cost (17% of Canadians vs 40% of U.S. Americans).

Yes, he's studied it thoroughly and has decided that the problem with the U.S. system is that it is not capitalistic enough. It needs to be deregulated like the food and banking industries. The problem isn't lack of access, it's about deciding who deserves what level of care--it's about rationing health care by one's ability to pay.

Even more importantly, it's not a matter of whether someone can receive the care they need, but whether society will allow him or her to access a free market solution to pay for that service. Is our society advanced enough to provide a patient's loved ones an opportunity to sell their organs to pay for needed health care? Have we achieved that level of compassionate capitalism yet? Do the poor and working classes care enough about life to make sacrifices to preserve it? If not, do they really deserve all of the benefits of life?

These are the fundamental questions to which Gratzer alludes, but, unfortunately, fails to fully address in his book. That's a shame, because these are the questions that must be answered if we are ever to fully achieve the libertarian society he envisions.

That said, Gratzer does honor laissez-faire capitalism with the blind worship that it deserves as the answer to everything (along with lower taxes and drilling in the ANWR). That's why I'm giving his book four stars.

65 of 99 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well informed view from the trenches, November 30, 2006

By 

James F. Strasma "strasma" (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (Hardcover)

I'm surprised to be the first to review The Cure, but it's a good enough book to have a review even if it has to be mine. I read this last week, along with Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, by Arnold Kling. I enjoyed them both equally, would recommend both as suitable introductions to understanding the problems of our current health care system and frequently-proposed alternatives.

The strong point of this book is that the author is licensed in both the U.S. and Canadian health care systems, and very familiar with both. Proponents of alternatives to our current system often seem to overlook the fact that all existing alternative systems also have problems, which cannot be improved by mere ignorance.

Combining this book's real world experience with the Kling book's hard-headed focus on economics provides much to chew over in the debates surely about to begin again in the U.S.

40 of 64 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Because Everyone Seems to Need The Cure, May 11, 2008

By 

Doug (Washington D.C. area) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (Paperback)

The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care is an excellent resource on health care economics and the history of health care policy. The author is a free market economist, a physician and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. The research that went into this book has been endorsed by Milton Friedman (in the Foreword) so it should be of appeal to free market advocates.

Dr. Gratzer persuasively argues that the fundamental problem with U.S. health care is too much government regulation. To argue this, Dr. Gratzer first notes how the employer-based health coverage arose as an unintended side effect of a tax law, which allowed employers to write off health care expenditures for their employees. Moreover, Dr. Gratzer argues that both Democrats and Republicans have both essentially offered more government regulation as the solution to health care, which has not worked. The Democrats, such as the LBJ Administration, promoted enormously inefficient programs such as Medicare and Medicaid. The Republicans, have promoted bureaucratic HMOs, which have led to similar large-scale inefficiencies.

Driving this point further, Dr. Gratzer greatly details the harmful economic consequences of government regulations in health care. For example, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) forbids hospitals from denying any patient for emergency care. The economic reality is that this leads to hospitals suffering economic losses by being forced to treat patients, regardless of if they can pay for the care, which ultimately leads to the closing of hospitals. Furthermore, insurance mandates, such as benefit mandates, rating mandates and bans on out-of-state insurance, restrict competition and lead to higher insurance premiums. Dr. Gratzer also thoroughly analyzes the harmful economic consequences of the FDA, Medicare, Medicaid and much more.

This book also dispels many common myths about the quality of U.S. health care. For example, statistics are often cited to argue that Canadians and/or Europeans have higher life expectancies than U.S. citizens. Dr. Gratzer argues that such studies mistakenly compare statistics on *health* when they should be on *health care*. There numerous lifestyle habits that differ between cultures, such as frequency of exercise and diet, which effect health. Dr. Gratzer proposes examining statistics on cardiac arrest patients, to see which country offers better treatment. In these respects, Dr. Gratzer argues that the U.S. system is clearly superior to its universal health care counterparts.

As one can infer, Dr. Gratzer proposes free market solutions to fix American health care. Specifically, he proposes drastically reducing the various regulatory excesses that he delineates throughout his book as well as embracing Health Savings Accounts. As always, Dr. Gratzer corroborates his arguments with real-world success stories, such as the success of Whole Foods' adoption of HSAs for its employees.

I highly recommend this book to all fans of free market capitalism with an interest in health care policy.