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26 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must read for health care reform, November 4, 2004
LIVES AT RISK is a must read for anyone interested in reforming the U.S. health care system. Goodman, Musgrave, and Herrick, stern critics of the existing system, warn against looking to Canada, the U.K., and other single-payer systems for solutions. ..... Opponents of single-payer insurance will find their views strongly validated by the mountains of carefully documented evidence in LIVES AT RISK. At the same time, open-minded proponents will learn the weaknesses in what they advocate; the book will lead some to rethink their support, and others to work harder in honing their arguments. Either way, the single-payer proponent who reads this book will become a smarter advocate of whatever views he holds afterwards. ..... LIVES AT RISK calmly, carefully catalogs and eviscerates widely held beliefs about the virtues of single-payer schemes. The authors methodically reveal how claims diverge from reality. The evidence in LIVES AT RISK paints a sharp contrast between the current American system (which the authors wish to change) and the single-payer systems abroad. Single-payer systems solemnly pledge that all citizens have a right to health care, whereas America does not. Yet by measure after measure, it is America that provides more complete, more egalitarian, more high-quality health care than do single-payer systems. Single-payer proponents argue that Canada, Britain, and others deliver health care more cheaply, more efficiently, and more equitably, but in LIVES AT RISK these lofty claims dissolve beneath the data. Again, a reasoned proponent of single-payer insurance can dispute the data presented, but he will have to work harder to do so, and that will enrich the public debate we need. ..... Goodman, Musgrave, and Herrick are not merely bomb-throwers who demolish single-payer insurance and then retire to the drawing room. Having addressed the failings they see in single-payer systems, they then turn toward the task of reforming the American system. They propose specific ways to harness the desires and intelligence of consumers to create a better system in the U.S. Once again, whether or not the reader buys the authors' proposals, he or she will leave the book with a far greater understanding of the task ahead.
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37 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Health Care in the Hands of Bureaucrats, January 18, 2005
There is little disagreement among stakeholders in the U.S. health care system--patients, insurers, physicians, policy analysts, and the like--that America's health care system must change to adjust to the twenty-first century. But what to do?
Some observers advocate a return to the fee-for-service health care arrangement that prevailed in the 1950s. Others want to move in the opposite direction, toward the government-run health care bureaucracies common in other developed countries.
Advocates of the latter approach, known as universal or single-payer health insurance, are a minority in the U.S. health policy debate--but they are vocal and well-funded. In Lives at Risk, John Goodman, Gerald Musgrave, and Devon Herrick urge that we disregard pleas for such a drastic change in our approach to health care until we carefully consider whether such a system--failing in every country where it currently exists--could possibly be effective and efficient for the U.S.
Goodman is founder and president of the Dallas, Texas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA); Musgrave and Herrick are NCPA senior fellows. In Lives at Risk, they examine in microscopic detail the many flaws in the structure of single-payer health insurance, and they provide evidence that single-payer social policy is not in the best interest of consumers.
They explain, for example, how universal health insurance systems encourage over-consumption by patients, and how such over-consumption always leads to financial crises and broken promises of universal access and quality care. "One of the cardinal beliefs of advocates of single-payer health insurance is that health care should be free at the point of consumption, regardless of willingness or ability to pay," they write. Not surprisingly, such "free" medical care is over-utilized--to the point where demand exceeds the system's ability to sustain supply.
Promise Clashes with Reality
Goodman and his coauthors reveal how the promise of "health care for all" under a single-payer system clashes with reality. "The promise of national health insurance," they explain, "is that government will make health care available on the basis of need rather than the ability to pay." But in reality, single-payer systems tend to overspend on primary care for the healthy, while denying more expensive specialist care to those with serious medical problems.
The evidence creates a sharp contrast between the U.S. health care system and single-payer systems abroad. Although single-payer advocates claim their approach delivers health care more efficiently, more equitably, and at lower cost than our system, those claims crack open under the weight of the data.
According to Lives at Risk, wherever national health care is the only option, rationing by waiting is the norm. Rationing decisions are made by local health care bureaucrats, who are responsible only for spending, not healing.
Lives at Risk should be required reading for academics and policymakers of all opinions on health policy reform--and also for the medical community, consumers, advocates of single-payer insurance, and journalists who report on the issue. Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, suggests in an editorial review, "This book will be an eye-opener for anyone who thinks a government-run system is the solution for our healthcare problem."
Information Age Requires New Approach
Dr. Robert Hamilton, a retired general and vascular surgeon living in Alton, Illinois, sees Lives at Risk from a physician's point of view. "Although this book is a brilliant exposition of the grand-scale effects of single payer health care financing and the economics of health care delivery, the implications for individual physicians and their patients are enormous," he noted
"Systemic inefficiencies, which interfere with timely, appropriate diagnosis and treatment of the individual patient, are dangerous and frustrating for physicians and patients alike in a system dominated by a government health care bureaucracy."
Hamilton suggests, "The way out of our professional doldrums is not through greater control of our profession by outside forces, but by making the patient-physician relationship the driving force. This book will restore optimism to those physicians whose frustration with imposed systems has nearly led them to give up on their noble profession."
Goodman, Musgrave, and Herrick do not just make a hard-boiled assessment of single-payer systems and then run for cover. They also turn their attention to the U.S. health care system. Instead of the usual worn-out generalities and obsolete assumptions, they point to specific problems and lay out specific ways to harness the intelligence of consumers and the power of the free market to improve health care in the U.S.
"The modern era has inherited two models of health insurance: the fee-for-service model and the HMO model. Neither is appropriate for the Information Age," they write. "Both models assume that (1) the amount of sickness is limited and largely outside the control of the insured, (2) methods of treating illness are limited and well-defined, and (3) because of patient ignorance and asymmetry of information, treatment decisions will always be filtered by physicians, based on their own knowledge and experience or clinical practice guidelines."
Regardless of whether the reader agrees with the authors' conclusions, Lives at Risk helps us understand how different policy approaches might lead to two very different outcomes for the U.S. health care system: complete meltdown under single-payer health care, or transformation into a system driven by consumer demand instead of health care bureaucrats and political expediency.
Conrad F. Meier (meier@heartland.org) is senior fellow in health policy at The Heartland Institute and Editor Emeritus Health Care News
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Libertarian critique of socialized medicine, August 25, 2009
This book is a critique of socialized medicine, as it exists in Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, by a team of free market economists. As befits an advocacy book, with a strong point of view, the authors are good at finding facts which undermine the arguments in favor of socialized medicine. They persuasively argue that national health systems not only cause patients to wait for long, often fatally long, periods of time before treatment, but that these systems are riddled with inequity based on politics.
This inequality manifests itself in some interesting, and to me at least unexpected, ways. Rural areas, of course, get poorer quality care than cities. Not surprising. The politically well-connected get better care than the man on the street. Not surprising. But the system as a whole pays a great deal of attention to people who are not very sick, and tends to short-change the critically ill. That surprised me. But it makes sense. These countries are democracies. Most people are not very sick. Politicians naturally want to provide benefits that the average person will see. Thus, in Germany, national health pays to send you to spas. In Britain, national health pays for ambulances for the not-very-sick which amount to glorified free taxicabs. But in both countries, there is a severage shortage of MRIs. The logic here is that the small minority which is very sick, tends to suck up most healthcare dollars, but that minority lacks enough political clout to get that result. Thus, national health tends to give the shaft to the very sick and the very old.
This book is very much worth reading. It has many interesting facts in it. I am less enthusiastic about the book than I might be, however, because the authors free market zeal was so strong. This lead them at times to make less than compelling arguments, in support of conclusions which free market theory supports but the facts do not. It also lead them to write often in terms of economic jargon, which I never like very much. Finally, it makes a a lot of what they say so out of touch politically that it is hard to take seriously. The authors may be right that a free market system is less likely to throw Grandma from the train than is a socialist system, but the Left is much better at expressing its thoughts as if they give a damm about Grandma. The way these guys argue is so abstract that it often leaves me cold.
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