Reforming Healthcare: What the Public Needs to Know - Tapa blanda

Wake up America! Have you given any thought to who will be providing your healthcare services in the next decade? Any healthcare delivery system, whether it is a National Health Service, an HMO, or a private delivery system, can offer healthcare services, but only a physician can provide those services. Will replacing the private healthcare delivery system with a National Health Service or with an HMO delivery system attract the best from among our youth into healthcare to become the providers of the public's healthcare services? Over the past three decades, neither Medicare nor the HMO industry have been provider friendly.

This book discusses the importance of a private healthcare delivery system to the future quality and availability of the public's healthcare services. Furthermore, it discusses the existing private delivery system's problems and how easily those problems can be corrected by six changes to regulate a private delivery system.

Three addenda are discussed:
1. Healthcare price controls.
2. Healthcare is not a business.
3. The HMO: Patients Beware.

Following fifty years in Medicine, the variety of Dr. Pratt?s experiences has provided him the background to write this book. Dr. Pratt began his career as a Family Physician. After a few years, he entered a specialty training program, and he became interested in teaching. He taught surgery at Temple University, in Philadelphia; at Western Reserve University, in Cleveland; at Washington University, in St. Louis; and as Jefferson Medical College, in Philadelphia. He finished his surgical career participating in the development of a new medical school in New Jersey. Following his retirement from his surgical career, he accepted administrative appointments as a hospital?s Vice President for Medical Affairs and as the Medical Director of an HMO. In addition, in 1969, he received a national award for his research.