Touch it and you die. Every politician knows this truism, which is why no one wants to debate it. Privately, many of them understand that the health care system, which costs about $200 billion a year in public and private money, cannot continue as it is—increasingly ill-adapted to an aging population with public costs growing faster than government revenues. In Chronic Condition, Jeffrey Simpson meets health care head on and explores the only four options we have to end this growing crisis: cuts in spending, tax increases, privatization, and reaping savings through increased efficiency. He examines the tenets of the Medicare system that Canadians cling to so passionately. Here, he finds that many other countries have more extensive public health systems, and Canadian health care produces only average value for money. In fact, our rigid system for some health care needs and a costly system for other needs—drugs, dentistry, and home care—is really the worst of both worlds. Chronic Condition breaks the silence about the huge changes and real choices that Canadians face.

    Jack Geiger, M.D., New York Times Book Review

    This is a disturbing, well-researched wake-up call for improving the current system of drug supply and manufacturing.Several decades ago, penicillin, vitamin C, and many other prescription and over-the-counter products were manufactured in the United States. But with the rise of globalization, antibiotics, antidepressants, birth control pills, blood pressure medicines, cancer drugs, among many others are made in China and sold in the United States. China's biggest impact on the US drug supply is making essential ingredients for thousands of medicines found in American homes and used in hospital intensive care units and operating rooms. The authors convincingly argue that there are at least two major problems with this scenario. First, it is inherently risky for the United States to become dependent on any one country as a source for vital medicines, especially given the uncertainties of geopolitics. For example, if an altercation in the South China Sea causes military personnel to be wounded, doctors may rely upon medicines with essential ingredients made by the adversary. Second, lapses in safety standards and quality control in Chinese manufacturing are a risk. Citing the concerns of FDA officials and insiders within the pharmaceutical industry, the authors document incidents of illness and death caused by contaminated medications that prompted reform. This probing book examines the implications of our reliance on China on the quality and availability of vital medicines.

    Ross I.S. Zbar spent his career as a plastic surgeon, in the US as well as abroad in developing countries, mending disease- and trauma-related deformities--and he was never hesitant to make his voice heard as an advocate for better patient care.Then, on a warm December day in 2018, Ross suffered a trauma that nearly took his life, putting him into the hands of his profession in a way he never anticipated. While his life was ultimately saved, his journey to wellness within the conventional medical establishment--from three weeks in the ICU to in-patient rehab--was nothing short of nightmarish. Frequently sedated and physically restrained, he was inundated with mental, emotional, and sensory evidence of an industry gone haywire, experiencing clearly from the patient side what he had only touched on as an advocate.Vowing to be an even stronger voice for change, Ross used the power of his mind to recover faster than any of his doctors predicted. Floating Feathers not only recounts his compelling story but elucidates a thoughtful and authoritative critical call to the members of his beloved profession for a massive overhaul."We possess the technology and the brilliant minds to motivate this level of sweeping change so desperately required," he says. "We simply need to champion it as a non-negotiable priority."This profoundly personal yet overarchingly relative book endeavors to be a vital first step toward that goal.

    Dr. John E. McDonough, DPH, a health policy expert who served as an advisor to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, provides a vivid picture of the intense effort required to bring this legislation into law. McDonough clearly explains the ACA’s inner workings, revealing the rich landscape of the issues, policies, and controversies embedded in the law yet unknown to most Americans. In his account of these historic events, McDonough takes us through the process from the 2008 presidential campaign to the moment in 2010 when President Obama signed the bill into law. At a time when the nation is taking a second look at the ACA, Inside National Health Reform provides the essential information for Americans to make informed judgments about this landmark law.

    They faced the same obstacles to healthy living that so many others face today: long hours, endless stress, constant eating out, and snacking out of boredom. When they finally decided to do something about it, they lost weight by applying what they know best—economics—to their waistlines. The Economists’ Diet outlines a straightforward, sustainable path for changing your eating habits. By combining economic principles, real-world data, and their own personal experiences, this guide teaches you how to control your impulses to overeat and learn how to approach food in a healthier way. Payne and Barnett provide simple solutions that you can use to achieve lasting results, without extreme dieting or giving up your favorite foods. By applying economic concepts, such as supply and demand, budgeting, and abundance, The Economists’ Diet is a unique and effective way to lose weight—and successfully keep it off.

    Every day, millions of hard-working people struggle to find affordable medical treatment for themselves and their families—unable to pay for prescription drugs and regular checkups, let alone hospital visits. Some of these people end up losing money. Others end up losing something even more valuable: their health or even their lives. In this powerful work of original reportage, Jonathan Cohn travels across the United States—the only country in the developed world that does not guarantee access to medical care as a right of citizenship—to investigate why this crisis is happening and to see firsthand its impact on ordinary Americans.The stories he brings back are tragic and infuriating. In Boston, a heart attack victim becomes a casualty of emergency room overcrowding when she is turned away from the one hospital that could treat her. In South Central L.A., a security guard loses part of his vision when he can't find affordable treatment for his diabetes. In the middle of the prairie heartland, a retired meatpacker sells his house to pay for the medications that keep him and his aging wife alive. And, in a tiny village tucked into the Catskill mountains, a mother of three young children decides against a costly doctor's visit—and lets a deadly cancer go undetected—because her husband's high-tech job no longer provides health insurance.Passionate, illuminating, and often devastating, Sick interweaves these stories with clear-eyed reporting from Washington and takes us inside the medical industry to chronicle the decline of America's health care system—and lays bare the consequences any one of us could suffer if we don't replace it.

    Transue began chronicling her experiences in her memoir of residency, On Call, and she continues her education here but the source of her knowledge about love, loss, hope and healing are not medical texts or professors but the patients she treats and gets to know – those she helps to wellness and those she must let go.

    Paul Farmer, a physician and anthropologist with twenty years of experience working in Haiti, Peru, and Russia, argues that promoting the social and economic rights of the world’s poor is the most important human rights struggle of our times. With passionate eyewitness accounts from the prisons of Russia and the beleaguered villages of Haiti and Chiapas, this book links the lived experiences of individual victims to a broader analysis of structural violence. Farmer challenges conventional thinking within human rights circles and exposes the relationships between political and economic injustice, on one hand, and the suffering and illness of the powerless, on the other.Farmer shows that the same social forces that give rise to epidemic diseases such as HIV and tuberculosis also sculpt risk for human rights violations. He illustrates the ways that racism and gender inequality in the United States are embodied as disease and death. Yet this book is far from a hopeless inventory of abuse. Farmer’s disturbing examples are linked to a guarded optimism that new medical and social technologies will develop in tandem with a more informed sense of social justice. Otherwise, he concludes, we will be guilty of managing social inequality rather than addressing structural violence. Farmer’s urgent plea to think about human rights in the context of global public health and to consider critical issues of quality and access for the world’s poor should be of fundamental concern to a world characterized by the bizarre proximity of surfeit and suffering.

    "International Business: The Challenges of Globalization" presents international business in a comprehensive yet concise framework with unrivaled clarity. Real-world examples and engaging features help bring the concepts to life and make international business accessible to all readers. The sixth edition captures and explains the influence of the global credit crisis and recent recession on international business, while also emphasizing its focus on the crucial role of emerging markets in today's global marketplace. Accompanied by myIBlab!myIBlab-myiblab.com-is a powerful online tool that combines assessment, reporting, and personalized study to help you succeed. It offers a personalized, interactive learning environment for international business with many customizable features, making it an ideal online learning platform that embodies convenience and simplicity.

    Gerard, PhD, its chief learning officer, candidly describe the triumphs and stumbles of a seven-year journey to lean healthcare, an effort that continues today and that has slashed medical errors, improved patient outcomes, raised staff morale, and saved $27 million dollars in costs without layoffs. Find out:> How lean techniques of value-stream-mapping and rapid improvement events cut the average “door-to-balloon” time for heart attack patients at two hospitals from 90 minutes to 37.> What ThedaCare leaders did to replace medicine’s “shame and blame” culture with a lean culture based on continuous improvement and respect for people.> How the lean principle of “building in quality at the source” broke down divisions among medical specialties allowing teams to develop patient care plans faster.> Why traditional modern management is the single biggest impediment to lean healthcare.> How the plan-do-study-act cycle coupled with rapid improvement events cut the wait time at a robotic radiosurgery unit from 26 days to six.> How the lean concept of “one piece flow” saved time in treating ischemic stroke patients, increasing the number of patients receiving a CT scan within 25 minutes from 51% to 89%.> How senior leaders at other healthcare organizations can begin their own lean transformations using a nine-step action plan based on what ThedaCare did — and what it would do differently.Toussaint and Gerard prove that lean healthcare does not mean less care. On the Mend shows that when care is truly re-designed around patients, waste and errors are eliminated, quality improves, costs come down, and healthcare professionals have more time to spend with patients, who get even better care.

    Designed for graduate and advanced undergraduate students, it includes the contributions of leading thinkers, educators, and practitioners who provide an in-depth and objective appraisal of why and how we organize health care the way we do; the enormous impact of health-related behaviors on the structure, function, and cost of the health care delivery system; and other emerging and recurrent issues in health policy, health care management, and public health. To update this book with the rapid changes that have occurred in health care through November 2013, a separate chapter, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) Supplement, is available to students and instructors as a downloadable PDF.This text is divided into five sections, in order to provide some coherence to this broad terrain. Part I, The Current U.S. Health Care System, addresses major characteristics and issues, including reform, financing, and comparative health care systems. This section now includes multiple new charts and tables providing concrete health care data. Part II, Population Health, focuses on health behavior, including health care models, public health policy and practice, risk factors, facilitating healthy lifestyle practices, and access to care. Part III, Medical Care Delivery, addresses integrated health models, delivering high-quality health care, health care costs and value, and comparative effectiveness. Part IV, Support for Medical Care Delivery, concerns governance and management issues, including accountability, the health workforce, and information technology. Part V, The Future of Health Care Delivery in the United States, includes a new 5-year trend forecast.Key Features: Includes major provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010Each chapter includes these special features: key concepts; extensive mapping resources; key words; learning objectives; discussion questions; and case studiesCovers the newest models of care, such as Accountable Care Organizations and Integrated Delivery SystemsExamines new ways of conceptualizing and assessing health care, including comparative effectiveness researchFeatures contributions by leading scholars and key figures within the U.S. health care system, including John Billings, JD; Carolyn M. Clancy, MD; C. Tracy Orleans, PhD; and Michael S. Sparer, PhD, JDContains new coverage of health reform, developing countries, population health, public health and catastrophic events, and a broadened discussion of the health care workforceAffordable Care Act (ACA) Supplement available to students and instructors as a downloadable PDF. Available to Instructors: Instructor's Guide (updated to reflect content from ACA supplement)PowerPoint PresentationsImage BankTest Bank (updated to reflect content from ACA supplement)"

    Some of these drugs are truly transformative, offering major improvements in how long patients live or how they feel--but what is often missing from the popular narrative is that, far too often, these new drugs have marginal or minimal benefits. Some are even harmful. In Malignant, hematologist-oncologist Dr. Vinayak K. Prasad writes about the many sobering examples of how patients are too often failed by cancer policy and by how oncology is practiced. Throughout this work, Prasad illuminates deceptive practices which- promote novel cancer therapies long before credible data are available to support such treatment; and- exaggerate the potential benefits of new therapies, many of which cost thousands and in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars.Prasad then critiques the financial conflicts of interest that pervade the oncology field, the pharmaceutical industry, and the US Food and Drug administration.This is a book about how the actions of human beings--our policies, our standards of evidence, and our drug regulation--incentivize the pursuit of marginal or unproven therapies at lofty and unsustainable prices. Prasad takes us through how cancer trials are conducted, how drugs come to market, and how pricing decisions are made, asking how we can ensure that more cancer drugs deliver both greater benefit and a lower price. Ultimately, Prasad says,- more cancer clinical trials should measure outcomes that actually matter to people with cancer;- patients on those trials should look more like actual global citizens;- we need drug regulators to raise, not perpetually lower, the bar for approval; and- we need unbiased patient advocates and experts.This well-written, opinionated, and engaging book explains what we can do differently to make serious and sustained progress against cancer--and how we can avoid repeating the policy and practice mistakes of the past.

    Marty Makary is co-developer of the life-saving checklist outlined in Atul Gawande's bestselling The Checklist Manifesto. As a busy surgeon who has worked in many of the best hospitals in the nation, he can testify to the amazing power of modern medicine to cure. But he's also been a witness to a medical culture that routinely leaves surgical sponges inside patients, amputates the wrong limbs, and overdoses children because of sloppy handwriting. Over the last ten years, neither error rates nor costs have come down, despite scientific progress and efforts to curb expenses. Why?To patients, the healthcare system is a black box. Doctors and hospitals are unaccountable, and the lack of transparency leaves both bad doctors and systemic flaws unchecked. Patients need to know more of what healthcare workers know, so they can make informed choices. Accountability in healthcare would expose dangerous doctors, reward good performance, and force positive change nationally, using the power of the free market. Unaccountable is a powerful, no-nonsense, non-partisan diagnosis for healing our hospitals and reforming our broken healthcare system.

    Houses, health care and higher education have become unaffordable to a majority of people, while the burden of unregulated monopolies, globalization and uncontrolled immigration has fallen disproportionately on the lower and middle classes. Wrapped in political correctness, an increasingly out of touch Western elite continues catering to special interests and fails to grasp the urgency for change. Populist movements harnessing public anger appear unable to propose and implement effective solutions. The last financial crisis was bad enough. But the next crisis will spread deeper and wider. And yet we stand economically, politically and most of all intellectually unprepared. This book is the story of how we have arrived at the brink of disaster and how we can move away from the win-lose policies of recent decades to restore much-needed balance.