6 of 7 customers found the following review helpful:
 Brave enough to read this book? , 2005-05-12
Richard D. Lamm, former three-term governor of Colorado, has written a thought-provoking book, which should be required reading for any American who pays taxes or who will some day get sick. America, some of its citizens often proclaim, has the "best health care system in the world." Not so, Lamm argues: our medical miracles are parceled out to certain segments of society while forty-plus million Americans lack basic health care. Public health statistics consistently show the US lagging behind other developed countries in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality. Lamm uses the data to support his contention in this book that "The time has come to ask--and answer--some hard questions about how American health care dollars are actually being spent and about what we as a society are getting for that expenditure."
Lamm should be commended for speaking forcefully and passionately on this subject. He addresses health-care rationing, allocation of public monies, the need for society to accept the inevitability of death, and the need for government to intercede in medical education (directing schools to train more primary care physicians as opposed to the preponderance of specialists we now have). The book is readable even for people unfamiliar with health care policy and economic theories. Numerous sidebars offer encapsulations of important concepts and statistics. He has a gift for explaining the conflict in easily understandable prose. He also leavens his harsh pronouncements with pithy comments, such as when he refers to former President Clinton's avowed goal of fighting all deadly diseases and writes,"What are we going to die of, rust?" His forthright voice makes one wonder how he ever got elected to public office.
The author concludes with a strategy for addressing our national health care crisis. If enough people read The Brave New World of Health Care, we the people may start to find our way out of what this former governor convincingly paints as an ever-deepening moral and financial morass facing the health of our society and its citizens.
3 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
Ethics and Economics - an American Challenge, 2004-07-09
Lamm clearly shows that the US health care system puts priority higher on the ethics of personal medical practice than it does on the overall health of the US population. Our (US) system is provider driven, which results in defensive medicine and over treatments. "Long shot" medical practice costs us: 27 percent of costs are for the sickest 1 percent. US spends about 50 percent more per person than other developed countries spend. Why? Says Lamm: "We fund too much marginal medicine and fail to fund enough basic health care. We spend too much on high technology medicine and not enough on prevention." This amounts to spending the budget to save a few trees while the forest gets weak and sick. The need exists to set limits on treatments, so that more people are more healthy and costs can be maintained, as European countries have done. This book does not claim to have all of the answers, but does challenge Americans to begin an honest debate of ethics vs costs. We should listen to his challenge. Buy this book now, before your medical costs get too high for you to afford it.
1 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
Endorsement for: THE BRAVE NEW WORLD OF HEALTH CARE, 2004-06-16
What health care nightmare has your name on it? The United States is $7 trillion in debt. Consumer debt exceeds $2 trillion. The average American credit card carries an $8,000.00 balance. As baby boomers eat and age their way into a health care pile up in the next 10 years, our health care industry recoils against horrific odds in providing for millions of Americans. Not withstanding, millions of legal and illegal immigrants have not and did not pay into a system they use today. Millions of uninsured Americans suffer.Governor Lamm, once again, identifies what is happening across the United States. He offers solutions that, if ignored, all Americans stand to suffer in the long term.
9 of 18 customers found the following review helpful:
 Darwinism in action, 2004-05-13
I give Governor Lamm two stars for trying to devise a solution to one of the most difficult public policy issues of our time. But his solution is horrific.He advocates a health care rationing plan in which, in effect, those who are sickest will be jettisoned in favor of those who are somewhat sick or not sick at all. It's not just social Darwinism, which deems poverty to be proof that those who are poor are inherently defective, that is, unfit to survive and therefore beyond help. This is Darwnism at its purest: the unhealthy are by definition unworthy of society's limited resources. Call it the life-raft approach. "Let's throw off the raft those we deem less likely to survive in order to improve the chances of those we believe more likely to survive." As Scrooge might put it, those who are in danger of dying "had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." It's not unlike the day when lepers were segregated into colonies. Merely a short step away is killing the unhealthy to prevent them from consuming any more of our limited health care dollars. Unthinkable? Germans didn't think that making Jews wear yellow stars would lead to their deliberate slaughter. Many people don't know that Hitler deemed the disabled as unfit for German society as Jews and slaughtered millions of disabled people as well. As you might imagine, I fall among the disabled. Through no fault of mine, multiple sclerosis has ravaged my middle-aged body. And it chills me to think that, under Lamm's "divert resources toward the fit" rationing, a healthy young serial murderer would get a liver transplant before I would. Moreover, researchers would have no incentive to find ways to reverse existing damage; when resources are explicitly diverted toward preserving health and preventing illness, doctors would be idiots to work toward treatments that fall far down on the list of health care priorities. Lamm correctly points out that we implicitly ration health care today. Those with insurance get more care than those without. But at least those without insurance can hope to get it someday. Nothing in the world will make a disabled person fit to compete against the young and healthy for health care. Lamm has framed the problem well. We do need an explicit method of rationing health care. But we need a lot more debate on the ethics of such a plan before we deem one segment of society irredeemably beyond its pale.
4 of 5 customers found the following review helpful:
Political science & public policy blend in serious discourse, 2004-05-06
Political science and public policy blend in a serious discourse by former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, who takes a fresh look at the current state of the American health care system in Brave New World Of Health Care. Problems in policy, professional circle, and in public attitudes and expectations alike are deftly surveyed in an engagingly thoughtful discussion of how reforms and changes may be enacted.
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Amazon Sales Rank:#483612