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The New Medical Marketplace: A Physician's Guide to the Health Care System in the 1990s

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The senior author and her colleagues describe in eloquentfashion the health care system within the United States up through theearly 1990s. Yet their work published by the prestigious Johns Hopkins University Press forecasts with uncanny acumen the state of U.S. health care well into the new millennium. While Dr. Stoline describes herself as a "casualty of reform fervor, a hopeless idealist (raised as I was by politically active parents in the 1960s)," she easily permits the reader to draw his or her own conclusion regarding the medical marketplace. The delineation of the factors in the equation comprised of cost crises, ethical and clinical dilemmas burgeoning due to the mingling of health care, third party payors (insurance), public policy and private profits, is superb and contributes to the timelessness of this volume. Physicians and other health care providers are often accused of being unable to clearly and succinctly articulate what is happening to the American health care environment. No such criticism can be leveled at this work and its authors. They address directly the issues, provide the supporting data, and challenge both our political and medical leadership, as well as the American people to stand up and take notice. Whether effective action will follow the infusion of this catalyst, only further time will tell. To date (mid-April of 2000), optimism must surely be on the decline from the vantage point of the authors. A challenge to readers: Read the book, stand up, take notice and then take action. That is the message I glean from this text...