Customer Reviews

False Hopes: Overcoming the Obstacles to a Sustainable, Affordable Medicine

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This is one the best books I've read this year, a year in which I've completed an MBA in Medical Group Management after being confronted with a concentrated dose of the issues facing healthcare today. I've been a practicing physician for 27 years and couldn't overstate how well this book lays out the problems we face in the delivery of health care. There will be many objections to the ideas and recommendations contained in this book, especially from the special interests who offer us naught but "False Hopes" for a utopian future; but, in the final analysis our future depends in large part on a devolution in health care to an affordable steady state which can serve the basic needs of our society--our whole society. If you want a stark yet sober answer to our overall healthcare conundrum, rather than a mere list of the problems we face, read this book. It's reminiscent of Schumacher--it's "Small is Beautiful" for health care.

This is an extremely pessimistic account of one man's view of the future of health care. The basic premise is we cannot afford progress and have too many expensive new medicines and interventional methods now. Tell that to your spouse, mother, father, son, daughter, sister, brother, etc... when they have a diagnosis of cancer. More progress in medicine is needed not less. I am in the medical field and couldn't disagree with this author more. The good news is this book was published in 1998 and no one has followed it's advice. A good thing too.

Callahan's arguments for healthcare rationing based on age are neither valid, nor logical. More importantly they are not consistent with the United States Federal Civil Rights laws that are enforced by the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), nor are they moral in the international community by review of the United Nation's Universal Declaration of Human Rights. http://www.un.org/Overview/rights.html