Understanding Health Policy, Sixth Edition

Understand how the healthcare system works – and how you can succeed in it Covers the 2010 Affordable Care Act A Doody's Core Title for 2015! 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 systemKey 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.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: The Paradox of Excess and Deprivation 2. Paying for Health Care 3. Access to Health Care 4. Reimbursing Health Care Providers 5. How Health Care is Organized 1: Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Care 6. How Health Care is Organized II: Health Delivery Systems 7. The Health Care Workforce and the Education of Health Care Professionals 8. Painful Versus Painless Cost Control 9. Mechanisms for Controlling Costs 10. Quality of Health Care 11. Prevention of Illness 12. Long-Term Care 13. Medical Ethics and Rationing of Health Care 14. Healh Care in Four Nations 15. Healh Care Reform and National Health Insurance 16. Conflict and Change in America's Health Care System 17. Conclusion: Tensions and Challenges 18. Questions and Discussion Topics

About the Author :
Author Profile: Thomas S. Bodenheimer, MD Clinical Professor Department of Family & Community Medicine University of California, San Francisco Kevin Grumbach, MD Associate Professor Department of Family & Community Medicine Institute for Health Policy Studies University of California, San Francisco Clinical Faculty San Francisco General Hospital