5th Edition
Healthcare Politics and Policy in America
Health policy in the United States has been shaped by the political, socioeconomic, and ideological environment, with important roles played by public and private actors, as well as institutional and individual entities, in designing the contemporary American healthcare system. Now in a fully updated fifth edition, this book gives expanded attention to pressing issues for our policymakers, including the aging American population, physician shortages, gene therapy, specialty drugs, and the opioid crisis. A new chapter has been added on the Trump administration's failed attempts at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act and subsequent attempts at undermining it via executive orders.
Authors Kant Patel and Mark Rushefsky address the key problems of healthcare cost, access, and quality through analyses of Medicare, Medicaid, the Veterans Health Administration, and other programs, and the ethical and cost implications of advances in healthcare technology. Each chapter concludes with discussion questions and a comprehensive reference list. This textbook will be required reading for courses on health and healthcare policy, as well as all those interested in the ways in which American healthcare has evolved over time.
Part I: Healthcare Politics and Policy
1. Healthcare Politics
2. Healthcare Policy in the United States
Part II: Government Health Programs
3. The Affordable Care Act: Stumbling Toward Universal Health Insurance?
4. Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program: Healthcare for the Poor and the Disabled
5. Medicare: Healthcare for the Elderly
6. Healthcare for American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Veterans
Part III: Problems of the Healthare System
7. Falling Through the Safety Net: The Disadvantaged
8. The Problem of Rising Healthcare Costs and Spending
Part IV: Contemporary Challenges in American Healthcare
9. The Role of Biomedical Technology: The Beginning and the End of Life
10. Challenges Facing the American Healthcare System
Part V: The Continuing Struggle for Healthcare Reform in the United States
11. Healthcare Politics and Policy in America: Moving Toward Reform?
Biography
Kant Patel is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Missouri State University, USA.
Mark Rushefsky is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Missouri State University, USA.
Healthcare Politics and Policy in America—now in its fifth edition—is the most reliable guide to America’s form of healthcare policy and politics available. Patel and Rushefsky turn a complex, hard to understand set of arrangements into a subject that is quite understandable, in a book that is clearly written and up to date.
The new edition not only brings the story of American healthcare politics and policy up to date but expands the scope of this comprehensive work. One of the three new chapters analyses the origins, character, and continued controversy over President Obama’s Affordable Care. Other revised chapters extend the discussion of healthcare inflation to a broad treatment both of bio-medical innovation and the social determinants of population health. What Patel and Rushefsky have accomplished is a remarkable synthesis of American political arrangements as they bear on the world of both medical care and public health.
Ted Marmor, Yale University, USA
Healthcare Politics and Policy in America is meticulously researched, insightful, and clearly written. This decidedly informative and ambitious text analyzes the broad range of core health policy issues, from specific programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and the problems experienced by disadvantaged sectors of society to the merits and failings of the Affordable Care Act. In this fifth edition, Patel and Rushefsky add a timely and balanced discussion of specific healthcare challenges we have yet to address effectively, including the role of biotechnology, the opioid crisis, gene therapy, high cost specialty prescription drugs, population aging, and the uncertainties regarding the healthcare labor force. Notably, the concluding chapter tackles thorny questions related to the values underlying our healthcare system, how well it performs compared to other nations, quality of services, and current proposals for reform. I highly recommend the book for both scholars and use in undergraduate and graduate courses in health politics and policy.
Laura Katz Olsen, Lehigh University, USA
