Medicare Matters: What Geriatric Medicine Can Teach American Health Care / Edition 1

by Christine Cassel

Overview

Savvy, comprehensive, and authoritative, this book, written by a physician with more than thirty years’ experience caring for elderly patients, assesses the current state and the future prospects of Medicare, perhaps the most influential health-insurance program of our time. Christine K. Cassel draws upon the latest developments in science and medicine in a sweeping analysis of Medicare’s social, demographic, institutional, political, and policy contexts. Writing in accessible language, using case studies to illustrate how policies translate to everyday lives, and applying lessons from the practice of geriatric medicine, Cassel makes a powerful argument for reforming and modernizing Medicare. She offers a new vision of what healthy aging could be and delineates what is needed to realize this vision, including changes in the medical sector, in the policy arena, and in our cultural beliefs about aging.

Cassel sheds light on a wide range of issues pertaining to Medicare, including debates about coverage and the looming deficit in the Medicare trust fund. Perhaps the most controversial issue she addresses is the challenge of rationing some kinds of care. Anchoring her discussion of Medicare in the idea that care for the elderly represents a social contract between government and its citizens, Cassel describes both the principles and potential of a progressive approach to geriatric medicine. She further argues that with this approach, we can also address the chronic problems of our larger health-care system and provide all Americans, no matter what their age, with high-quality and affordable medical care.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520251564
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	03/29/2007
Series:	California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public , #14
Edition description:	First Edition, With a New Preface
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Christine K. Cassel, M.D., is President and CEO of the American Board of Internal Medicine and ABIM Foundation.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Foreword, by Daniel M. Fox

Introduction
1. Medicare and the Social Contract
2. Longevity and Health
3. Quality of Care
4. Care Management: The Key to Modern Geriatric Medicine
5. Palliative Care
6. Coverage
7. Why Sixty-five?
8. Prescription Drugs
9. Finance
10. Politics
11. Rationing is
Inevitable
12. The Social Contract

Notes

Index

Editorial Reviews

A practitioner of geriatric medicine for more than 30 years, Cassel (president & CEO, American Board of Internal Medicine; The Culture of Caregiving) argues that her specialty provides a model for the way Medicare can be improved and expanded. Geriatricians promote healthy lifestyles, manage chronic conditions, and provide personalized palliative and end-of-life care. In doing so, they both improve patients' quality of life and lower costs. The present system of compensation under Medicare, Cassel contends, drives care toward more expensive and often unnecessary procedures while discouraging low-tech care (e.g., having extended conversations with patients and families; coordinating caregivers). What's more, universal coverage exists-inefficiently, as in emergency care-but is generally not acknowledged. The government, she says, should set broad goals and decide on financing, letting professionals handle the medical care in an evidence-based manner. More focused on Medicare and with more of a clinician's perspective than David M. Cutler's Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System, this clearly written and documented book is recommended for public and academic libraries.-Dick Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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