Understanding Health Policy

The most trusted and comprehensive guide to the healthcare system—fully updated with the latest changes and trends A Doody's Core Title for 2021! Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach provides everything you need to master the healthcare system’s nuances and complexities, work more effectively with other members of healthcare teams, and identify areas in need of change. Written by practicing primary care physicians who are experts in healthcare policy, this peerless guide covers the entire scope of the U.S. healthcare system and draws on lessons from systems in other nations. The authors carefully weave key principles, descriptions, and concrete examples into chapters that make vital health policy issues interesting and understandable. Whether you’re a student, medical practitioner, or public policy professional, you will come away with a clearer, more systematic way of thinking about our healthcare system, its biggest challenges, and the most effective ways of making it better for everyone. Features • Covers every aspect of healthcare, including finance, organization, and reimbursement • Delivers updated information on the Affordable Care Act, Accountable Care Organizations, and system consolidation • Provides new insights into the role of social determinants in patient health • Clinical vignettes highlight key policy issues and clarify difficult concepts

Numerous case examples illustrate fundamental topics such as cost containment, health insurance, primary care, and physician and hospital payment. In addition, this book does a superior job linking policy issues to the practice of medicine. The second edition features a brand new chapter on payment in managed care.

In recent years the pace of reform in health policy and the NHS has been relentless. But how are policies formed and implemented? This fully updated edition of a bestselling book explores the processes and institutions that make health policy, examining what constitutes health policy, where power lies, and what changes could be made to improve the quality of health policy making. Drawing on original research by the author over many years, and a wide range of secondary sources, the book examines the role of various institutions in the formation and implementation of health policy. Unlike most standard texts, it considers the impact of devolution in the UK and the role of European and international institutions and fills a need for an up-to-date overview of this fast-moving area. It features new case studies to illustrate how policy has evolved and developed in recent years. This new edition has been fully updated to reflect policies under the later years of New Labour and the Coalition government. Although written particularly with the needs of students and tutors in mind, this accessible textbook will also appeal to policy makers and practitioners in the health policy field.

Used across the public health field, this is the leading text in the area, focusing on the context, participants and processes of making health policy.

This book examines the current state of American health care using a social science lens to focus on the interdependent, intercultural, economic, and communication aspects of access and delivery. This text explores how the cultures of health care organizations, health professions, governments, and capitalism, as well as communication, all contribute to a disease-focused, economically driven, technology-centered health care system. It seeks to understand 21st century health care from a macro-level view based on historical realizations and the current plethora of interdependent, but self-serving realities that provide few, if any, incentives for organizational collaboration and change. The fact that the most expensive health care system in the world does not provide the healthiest outcomes is a driving force in this exploration. By reflecting on American values and beliefs regarding health care from philosophical, clinical, communication, and cost perspectives, this text is designed to encourage an organizational transformation at every level, from government to providers to patients. This comprehensive survey is an important guide for those studying, or working in, health care professions, as well as health care policy and administration. It should also be of interest to any reader who seeks to better understand U.S. health care policy from social science, economic, and/or health communication perspectives.

The need for informed analyses of health policy is now greater than ever. The twelve essays in this volume show that public debates routinely bypass complex ethical, sociocultural, historical, and political questions about how we should address ideals of justice and equality in health care. Integrating perspectives from the humanities, social sciences, medicine, and public health, this volume illuminates the relationships between justice and health inequalities to enrich debates. Understanding Health Inequalities and Justice explores three questions: How do scholars approach relations between health inequalities and ideals of justice? When do justice considerations inform solutions to health inequalities, and how do specific health inequalities affect perceptions of injustice? And how can diverse scholarly approaches contribute to better health policy? From addressing patient agency in an inequitable health care environment to examining how scholars of social justice and health care amass evidence, this volume promotes a richer understanding of health and justice and how to achieve both. The contributors are Judith C. Barker, Paula Braveman, Paul Brodwin, Jami Suki Chang, Debra DeBruin, Leslie A. Dubbin, Sarah Horton, Carla C. Keirns, J. Paul Kelleher, Nicholas B. King, Eva Feder Kittay, Joan Liaschenko, Anne Drapkin Lyerly, Mary Faith Marshall, Carolyn Moxley Rouse, Jennifer Prah Ruger, and Janet K. Shim.

Understand how the healthcare system works – and how you can succeed in it Covers the 2010 Affordable Care Act The most trusted and comprehensive guide to healthcare available, Understanding Health Policy provides everything students and professionals need to build a solid foundation on the field’s most critical issues. Expert practitioners in both the public and private healthcare sectors, the authors cover the entire scope of our healthcare system—from the concepts behind policy decisions to concrete examples of how they affect patients and professionals alike. Understanding Health Policy, 6e makes otherwise difficult concepts easy to understand—so you can make better decisions, improve outcomes, and enact positive change on a daily basis. Features: Coverage of structure, organization, and financing of the health care system Key principles, descriptions, and concrete examples are skillfully interwoven in each chapter to make important issues interesting and understandable Clinical vignettes clarify difficult concepts and demonstrate how they apply to real-world situations Comprehensive list of review questions reinforce what you have learned Understanding Health Policy, 6e will help you develop a clearer, more systematic way of thinking about health care in the United States, its problems, and the alternatives for managing and solving these problems.

No single discipline can provide a full account of why health care is the way it is. Introducing an accessible overview of health services and drawing on medicine, sociology, economics, history and epidemiology, this book provides a series of conceptual frameworks which help to clarify some of the complexity that confronts the inexperienced observer. Helping to determine what influences and shapes health services, it also examines some of the key processes involved in providing healthcare, considering three levels: individual patients, health care organizations such as hospitals, and regional or national institutions such as governments. This second edition has been updated to include recent developments and further examples and activities from low, middle and high income countries. The book examines: • how medical knowledge, staff, patients and finance shape health services • what factors influence utilization of health services • the roles played by users of health services • how to define and measure outcomes and assess performance • how practice and policy can be changed to improve the quality of health care Understanding Health Services, 2nd Edition is an essential resource for students of public health and health policy, researchers, public health practitioners and policy makers. Understanding Public Health is an innovative series published by Open University Press in collaboration with the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, where it is used as a key learning resource for postgraduate programmes. It provides self-directed learning covering the major issues in public health affecting low, middle and high income countries. "This excellent book provides an ideal background to understanding how health services work and how they can be studied. Not tied to any particular country, it includes key chapters on how health services have developed and are organised, need and demand, the role of health professionals, and measuring and improving quality of care. The book is ideal reading for students on Masters courses in public health and related subjects from high-, middle- and low-income countries and includes learning objectives and exercises in each chapter which can be completed individually or used for discussion. Strongly recommended." Martin Roland, Emeritus Professor of Health Services Research, University of Cambridge, UK "Health services are central to attaining high levels of population health and providing those services consumes a substantial share of our financial resources. This book provides a splendid introduction to many of the key building blocks including medical knowledge and other key inputs, payment and other factors that influence utilization, and in turn quality of care and outcomes. The learning objectives are a wonderful aid for self-directed learning as are the directed activities and feedback, the text is lucid and the main concepts are very easy to access. This is a great book for someone looking to develop a broad understanding of health services. I will be surprised if it does not become a classic. It will surely be at the top of my list of recommended readings for my own students." Arnold M Epstein, John H Foster Professor and Chair, Department of Health Policy and Management, Harvard School of Public Health, USA