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HEALTH CARE MELTDOWN by Robert LeBow, Alan C. Hood & Company, Chambersburg, PA 2004 A great book on what's wrong and how to fix it. One flaw is the lack of emphasis on achieving rights such as right to health care by grassroots action on the state level. Written in plain easy to understand english - great for everyone.
SICKNESS AND WEALTH: The Corporate Assault on Global Health, Edited by Meredith Fort, Mary Anne Mercer and Oscar Gish. South End Press 2004. $18 Sickness and Wealth is an enlightening and in-depth collection of essays on this, perhaps the most central, of corporate assaults. This book will raise any reader’s awareness of how health care issues, especially in the third world, are naturally intertwined with the issues of poverty, environmental degradation, militarism, racism, issues of democratic participation and all issues of economic justice. Read a longer review.
PATHOLOGIES OF POWER: HEALTH, HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE NEW WAR ON THE POOR (2003), by Dr. Paul Farmer, University of California Press; (November 1, 2004), ISBN: 0520243269, 419 pages
Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, faculty member of the Harvard Medical School, Department of Social Medicine, is a medical anthropologist whose work draws primarily on active clinical practice and focuses on diseases disproportionately afflicting the poor. He divides his clinical time between the Brigham and Women's Hospital and a charity hospital in rural Haiti. This is a wonderful, moving book and speaks passionately and convincingly about why we must recognize the right to health care -the world over. See a longer review CLICK HERE.
FALLING THROUGH THE SAFETY NET: AMERICANS WITHOUT HEALTH INSURANCE by Dr. John Geyman, Common Courage Press, 2004, $18.95. This is a great introductory book to universal health care, and can also serve well as one of your basic references on the subject. it is well-written and highly readable, accessible to almost any concerned party. The one caveat is that Dr. Geyman's chapter on the "Right to Health Care" is misinformed, shallow and (therefore) dismissive of the topic. The book would have been much better had he left that chapter out. Having added it and then failing to do any serious study or responsible consideration of human rights law generally, social-economic rights law, or of similar civil rights laws did the entire book, which was otherwise so excellent, a terrible disservice.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DRUG COMPANIES: HOW THEY DECEIVE US AND WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT. Dr. Marcia Angell, Random House, 2004, $24.95
TOWARD A HEALTHY SOCIETY: The Morality and Politics of American Health Reform. Milton
Fisk University Press of Kansas. 2000. 300 pps. ISBN
0-7006-1014-6
CRITICAL CONDITION: HOW HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA BECAME BIG BUSINESS AND BAD MEDICINE by Donald Barlett and James Steele, Random House, 2004, $24.95
PROFIT FEVER: The Drive to Corporatize Health Care and How to Stop It. Charles Andrews, Common Courage Press, 1995.
HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE POLICY: A SOCIAL WORK PERSPECTIVE. Cynthia Moniz and Stephen Gorin, copyright 2003, ISBN: 0-205-30672-1
More info on this title.
STRONG MEDICINE: How to save Canada's Health Care System. Michael Rachlis, M.D. and Carol Kushner, Harper Perennial Press, 1995
BENCHMARKS OF FAIRNESS FOR HEALTH CARE REFORM. N Daniels, D Light and R Caplan, Oxford University Press, 1996. The book explains criteria that should be considered when proposing reform of our health system, and applies those benchmarks to four proposals. The evaluation can easily be adjusted to accommodate additional values and principles, but it is a great starting point.
CROSSING THE QUALITY CHASM (2001 a downloadable
briefing) and TO ERR IS HUMAN (1998, report), both by the Institute of Medicine.
To Err Is Human asserts that the problem is not bad people in health care--it is that good people are working in bad systems that need to be made safer. Comprehensive and straightforward, this book offers a clear prescription for raising the level of patient safety in American health care
HEALTH CARE IN AMERICA - Can Our Ailing System Be Healed?
By John P. Geyman, M.D. Publishers
website. This book is a useful reference with a detailed history of
reform. It is written for academics and can be difficult to get through
for a layperson. A better introductory treatment is Healthcare
Meltdown.
THE CORPORATE TRANSFORMATION OF HEALTH CARE CAN THE PUBLIC INTEREST STILL BE SERVED? By John P. Geyman, MD. 2004 328pp 0-8261-2466-6. The author explores how the corporate transformation of hospitals, HMOs, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in reduction in services, dangerous cost cutting, poor regulation, and corrupt research. He sheds light on the political lobbying and media manipulation that keeps the present system in place. Exposing the shortcomings of reform proposals that do little to alter the status quo, he makes a case for a workable single-payer system.
AS SICK AS IT GETS By Rudy Mueller, M.D. This book describes in
excruciating detail how frightful our health care system has become.
RADICAL SURGERY By Mel Hawkins This book has a strange place among books which are in favor of national health insurance. The author has some extremely strange and unsupported ideas about how to make NHI work, including both capitation of physicians and allowing market forces to dictate which physicians are the best in the system. Avoids the most crucial critiques of of these recommendations. NOT recommended.
PUBLIC HEALTH IN THE MARKET: Facing Managed Care, Lean Government, and Health Disparities, by Nancy Milio, 2000, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor
UNDERSTANDING HEALTH POLICY. by Thomas Bodenheimer and Kevin Grumbach
LIFE SUPPORT: Three Nurses on the Front Line. Suzanne Gordon, Little, Brown and Company, 1997 (well-written account and certainly targets market medicine as major problem)
BLEEDING THE PATIENT: The Consequences of Corporate Health Care.
Himmelstein, Woolhandler and Hellander. Common Courage Press, Monroe,
ME. 2001. 240 pps.
UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE: What The United States Can Learn From The Canadian Experience, by Pat and Hugh Armstrong, with Claudia Fegan, M.D., The New Press 1998
A few additonal titles related to state organizing for UHC but not written specifically about work in the health care arena:
DON'T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. George Lakoff see review
MORAL POLITICS: How the Liberals and Conservatives Think. George Lakoff see review
WHAT'S THE MATTER WITH KANSAS? How Conservaties won the Heart of America. Thomas Frank see review
EVERYTHING FOR SALE: The Virtues and Limits of Markets. Robert Kuttner, Alfred A Knopf Publications, 1998.
SCHOOL: The Story of American Public Education.
Tyack, D.E., J.D. Anderson, L. Cuban, C.F. Kaestle, D. Ravitch. Beacon
Press 2001
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