The Private Regulation of American Health Care [Paperback]

Betty Leyerle (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

By focusing on the past two decades' changes in health care, Leyerle, a sociology professor, illuminates the role of business and its representatives in defining an agenda of rationalization and bureaucratic surveillance directly opposed to the movement for democratically controlled health care that grew out of 1960s activism. Though Leyerle's study draws on the theories of Weber, Marx, and Foucault, readers need little academic preparation to follow her narrative of the ways industry-manipulated government, third-party payers, and health-care providers worked to restructure the nation's medical system based on business definitions of efficiency and appropriateness. Leyerle sketches successive waves of health-care laws and regulations and constant product redesign (from HMOs and DRGs to managed care and outcomes research) that have progressively shifted medical decision making from doctors and patients to a complex new bureaucracy of experts who focus upon dollars instead of disease. A timely reminder that Cui bono? is always a relevant question. Mary Carroll --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 229 pages
• Publisher: M E Sharpe Inc (March 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1563242893
• ISBN-13: 978-1563242892
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #841,839 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Tour de force exegesis of capital's takeover of health care, September 19, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Private Regulation of American Health Care (Paperback)

I have read many, many articles and books about managed care, but Betty Leyerle's book is by far the best and most penetrating analysis of the planned and schemed takeover of our health care system by big capital. As she explains and documents, the motives for managed care's rise are both money and ideology: The corporate sector was frightened by Medicare in the late sixties and the spectre of what they saw as "socialized medicine," and managed care was their response. Instead of a health care system based on the medical needs of the population, the managed care system gives us health care based on a system of "choices" stratified by cost factors and controlled by businessmen. Instead of health care delivered by professionals according to the ethics of the hippocratic oath, managed care gives us systems of surveilance and business-style bureaucracy based on principles of cost-effectiveness and accountability. Leyerle's book discusses the rationales, and the history of the strategies and legislative initiatives that business employed to accomplish its goals, as well as exposing its dubious assumptions and self-serving claims. If you read just one book on managed care, this should be it.