The Private Regulation of American Health Care

by Betty Leyerle

Overview

This work discusses a transformation of health care delivery that was launched by coalitions of business leaders during the early 1970s. It argues for a single-payer system and considers how public regulation offers the possibility of democratic participation in setting health care policies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781315287355
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	09/16/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
Lexile:	1490L (what's this?)
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Betty Leyerle is Professor of Sociology and Human Services at Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado. She is the author of Moving and Shaking American Medicine: The Structure of a Socioeconomic Transformation (1984). Dr. Leyerle holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the City University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Managed Competition—The Private Regulation of American Health Care; Chapter 1 The Twenty-Year-Old Crisis; Chapter 2 The Basic Components of Private Regulation; Chapter 3 The Evolution of Private Regulation; Chapter 4 Managing Health; Chapter 5 Managing “Quality” through Outcomes Research; Chapter 6 Conclusions;

Editorial Reviews

By focusing on the past two decades' "changes" in health care, Leyerle, a sociology professor, illuminates the role of business and its representatives in defining an agenda of rationalization and bureaucratic surveillance directly opposed to the movement for democratically controlled health care that grew out of 1960s activism. Though Leyerle's study draws on the theories of Weber, Marx, and Foucault, readers need little academic preparation to follow her narrative of the ways industry-manipulated government, third-party payers, and health-care providers worked to restructure the nation's medical system based on business definitions of efficiency and appropriateness. Leyerle sketches successive waves of health-care laws and regulations and constant product redesign (from HMOs and DRGs to managed care and outcomes research) that have progressively shifted medical decision making from doctors and patients to a complex new bureaucracy of experts who focus upon dollars instead of disease. A timely reminder that Cui bono? is always a relevant question.

Mary Carroll

Sociologist Leyerle describes how powerful groups have used such bureaucratic rhetoric as rationality, accountability, and technical efficiency to manipulate, divide, and polarize segments of the population to allow the US health care system to be radically transformed without the possibility of concerted political resistance. She draws on the theories of Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Michel Foucault, but speaks in plain language. Paper edition (289-3), $17.50. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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