Customer Reviews

The Private Regulation of American Health Care

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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.