Caring For Profit

Caring For Profit traces how Canada's $77 billion a year health care industry is turning away from its original mandate of providing the best possible medical care to Canadians, and how multinational capital is forcing its way into our non'profit health care system. In Caring For Profit, Colleen Fuller traces alliances that were struck between private insurers and the medical profession during the 1950s and 1960s to defeat "socialized medicine". These alliances survived the establishment of medicare in Canada in 1968, and have been strengthened by new forces emerging in an era of globalization. Instead of a health care system focused on providing the highest quality of care to the greatest number of Canadians, the system is increasingly dominated by financial giants more concerned with consolidations, mergers, acquisitions, and higher profit margins. Caring for Profit is a "who's who" of key people and corporations making money in Canada's health care sector ? and a portrait of the strategies and alliances that threaten to replace the principles of medicare with the dictates of the stock market.

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

An introduction to the new health care for profit. Legal differences between investor-owned and nonprofit health care institutions. Wall Street and the for-profit hospital management companies. When investor-owned corporations buy hospitals: some issues and concerns. Physician involvement in hospital decision making. Economic incentives and clinical decisions. Ethical dilemmas of for-profit enterprise in health care. Secondary income from recommended treatment: should fiduciary principles constrain physician behavior?

In recent years, the hospital industry has been undergoing massive change and reorganization with technological innovations and the spread of managed care. As a result, the total number of hospitals countrywide has been declining, and a growing number of not-for-profit hospitals have converted to for-profit status. These changes raise two fundamental questions: What determines a hospital's choice of for-profit or not-for-profit organizational form? And how does that form affect patients and society? This timely volume provides a factual basis for discussing for-profit versus not-for-profit ownership of hospitals and gives a first look at the evidence about new and important issues in the hospital industry. The Changing Hospital Industry: Comparing Not-for-Profit and For-Profit Institutions will have significant implications for public-policy reforms in this vital industry and will be of great interest to scholars in the fields of health economics, public finance, hospital organization, and management; and to health services researchers.

A New York Times bestseller/Washington Post Notable Book of 2017/NPR Best Books of 2017/Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2017 "This book will serve as the definitive guide to the past and future of health care in America.”—Siddhartha Mukherjee, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Emperor of All Maladies and The Gene At a moment of drastic political upheaval, An American Sickness is a shocking investigation into our dysfunctional healthcare system - and offers practical solutions to its myriad problems. In these troubled times, perhaps no institution has unraveled more quickly and more completely than American medicine. In only a few decades, the medical system has been overrun by organizations seeking to exploit for profit the trust that vulnerable and sick Americans place in their healthcare. Our politicians have proven themselves either unwilling or incapable of reining in the increasingly outrageous costs faced by patients, and market-based solutions only seem to funnel larger and larger sums of our money into the hands of corporations. Impossibly high insurance premiums and inexplicably large bills have become facts of life; fatalism has set in. Very quickly Americans have been made to accept paying more for less. How did things get so bad so fast? Breaking down this monolithic business into the individual industries—the hospitals, doctors, insurance companies, and drug manufacturers—that together constitute our healthcare system, Rosenthal exposes the recent evolution of American medicine as never before. How did healthcare, the caring endeavor, become healthcare, the highly profitable industry? Hospital systems, which are managed by business executives, behave like predatory lenders, hounding patients and seizing their homes. Research charities are in bed with big pharmaceutical companies, which surreptitiously profit from the donations made by working people. Patients receive bills in code, from entrepreneurial doctors they never even saw. The system is in tatters, but we can fight back. Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal doesn't just explain the symptoms, she diagnoses and treats the disease itself. In clear and practical terms, she spells out exactly how to decode medical doublespeak, avoid the pitfalls of the pharmaceuticals racket, and get the care you and your family deserve. She takes you inside the doctor-patient relationship and to hospital C-suites, explaining step-by-step the workings of a system badly lacking transparency. This is about what we can do, as individual patients, both to navigate the maze that is American healthcare and also to demand far-reaching reform. An American Sickness is the frontline defense against a healthcare system that no longer has our well-being at heart.

The issue of justice in the field of health care is becoming more central with concerns over access, cost and provision. Obamacare in the United States and the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in the United Kingdom are key examples illustrating the increasing pressure put on governments to find just and equitable solutions to the problem of health care provision. Justice and Profit in Health Care Law explores the influence of justice principles on the elaboration of laws reforming health care systems. By examining the role played by key for-profit stakeholders (doctors, employers and insurers), it tracks the evolution of distributive norms for the allocation of health care resources in western welfare states. Essentially, this book sheds light on the place given to justice in the health care law-making process in order to understand the place we wish to give these principles in future health care reforms.

The issue of justice in the field of health care is becoming more central with concerns over access, cost and provision. Obamacare in the United States and the Health and Social Care Act 2012 in the United Kingdom are key examples illustrating the increasing pressure put on governments to find just and equitable solutions to the problem of health care provision. Justice and Profit in Health Care Law explores the influence of justice principles on the elaboration of laws reforming health care systems. By examining the role played by key for-profit stakeholders (doctors, employers and insurers), it tracks the evolution of distributive norms for the allocation of health care resources in western welfare states. Essentially, this book sheds light on the place given to justice in the health care law-making process in order to understand the place we wish to give these principles in future health care reforms.