PDF Reinsuring Health Why More MiddleClass People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do 9780871547880 Medicine Health Science Books

Product details Paperback 220 pages Publisher Russell Sage Foundation (July 12, 2007) Language English ISBN-10 0871547880

Reinsuring Health Why More MiddleClass People Are Uninsured and What Government Can Do 9780871547880 Medicine Health Science Books Reviews

• Katherine Swartz, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, wrote a carefully researched and persuasive account of how the Federal Government can help control health care costs by reinsuring the top one percent of health care expenditures, therefore eliminating the dreaded death spiral of insurnance companies. It would be a simplified way of helping the individual and small group markets.
• Over 15% of the American population has no health insurance, and polls show that the American public is worried about their own health insurance. The American health care system seems both precarious and mysterious even some solidly employed and middle-class people cannot access affordable health insurance and even go deep into debt because of medical bills; still others stay in jobs solely because they don't want to go without insurance.
  
  Professor Swartz gives vivid portaits of the wide variety of uninsured people in the US. Her portraits are based in real individuals, and show the true dilemmas faced by the uninsured. She also presents a solid economic description of how the health insurance market developed as it did, giving clear explanations for how adverse selection makes it difficult for people without employer-based insurance to obtain affordable health insurance, and why the states' attempts to make insurance more available have failed.
  
  Her plan for making health insurance available and affordable for more Americans is truly moderate. It accounts for market forces, but arises from compassion for the uninsured. This book should appeal to both liberals and conservatives. The reader of this book will come away with a strong understanding of the American health insurance market, and an ability to look more critically at the health care proposals which will be proposed over the next few years.
• I found that the author did a very good job of laying out the issue; which is that too many in the U.S. are without healthcare and why that is happening. The author did describe the issue well of the impact of anti- selection and underwritng in the insurance market. The author's solution does seem to miss the target because it does not recognize how hospitals bill different charge levels today to different payers. Nor did it recognize that many healthcare firms do not reinsure coverage today, thereby a program as suggested would be adding adminsitrative burdens on those carriers. The book is a relatively easy read at 147 pages.