Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System

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PublicAffairs, Mar 4, 2014 - Health & Fitness - 400 pages
The definitive story of American health care today—its causes, consequences, and confusions

In March 2010, the Affordable Care Act was signed into law. It was the most extensive reform of America’s health care system since at least the creation of Medicare in 1965, and maybe ever. The ACA was controversial and highly political, and the law faced legal challenges reaching all the way to the Supreme Court; it even precipitated a government shutdown. It was a signature piece of legislation for President Obama’s first term, and also a ball and chain for his second.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own—quite distinct—American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.
Emanuel also explains exactly how the ACA reforms are reshaping the health care system now. He forecasts the future, identifying six mega trends in health that will determine the market for health care to 2020 and beyond. His predictions are bold, provocative, and uniquely well-informed. Health care—one of America’s largest employment sectors, with an economy the size of the GDP of France—has never had a more comprehensive or authoritative interpreter.
 

Contents

Erins Disease
1
PART I
13
Financing Health Care
34
3
51
How Americans Get Their Health Care
68
5
127
Enacting the Affordable Care
159
What the Supreme Court Said
188
The ACA Dashboards
295
Health Care Reform 2 0
306
Six Megatrends in Health Care
317
A Final Thought
345
Further Readings
351
Index
357
279
359
About the Author
381

What Is in the Affordable Care Act?
255
PART III
277

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About the author (2014)

Ezekiel J. Emanuel is vice provost for global initiatives and chair of the department of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania. From January 2009 to January 2011, he was a special adviser on health care reform to the White House. He is the author or editor of ten books and over 250 scientific articles. He is currently a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a columnist for the New York Times, a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal, contributing editor at The New Republic, and appears regularly on television, including Morning Joe, Real Time with Bill Maher, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and the Rachel Maddow Show.

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