Reinventing American Health Care

In this unabashedly pro-Obama-care book, prominent bioethicist Emanuel makes a convincing, albeit one-sided, case for overhauling what he sees as an unfair health system in the U.S. Deftly using numbers to make his arguments, Emanuel organizes his book into three parts: the current system (largely its financing), health-care reform (the nearly 1,000-page Affordable Care Act ACA and legal challenges to it), and the future (lots of hospital closings). Today more money goes to the 4,985 acute-care hospitals ($970 billion in 2012) than all of Social Security ($730 billion) or national defense ($650 billion). And before ACA, nearly 50 million Americans, including 12 million undocumented aliens, lacked insurance. He also touches on important history (the creation of Medicare in 1965) and clearly explains complicated issues. For example, he uses a menu-pricing analogy to explain bundled payments: “If fee-for-service is ordering à la carte, bundled payment is prix fixe.” A plain-English explanation of a tricky topic