Hard choices : health care at what cost? /

Originally prepared as a five-part series for the Philadelphia Inquirer, this eminently readable volume addresses important issues in health care reform through the experiences of individual patients and physicians in three hospitals located in suburban Philadelphia, Toronto, and Munich. The anecdotal approach skillfully guides the reader through complex implications of different forms of health care financing in very human terms. The book cites elements of the Canadian and German systems that are clearly relevant to health reform policy debate. Universal coverage is an example: A hard choice made by Lankenau Hospital near Philadelphia is whether to admit a patient despite her lack of health insurance. The hospital did, but not before exacting a significant psychological and economic toll on the family; a toll not shared by patients in Toronto's York Hospital or the Schwabing Hospital in Munich. Doctors' views on their respective health care systems are reviewed; two chapters relate differences in health care practices among the three countries using birth and heart surgery as examples, and a concluding chapter discusses fundamental questions of fairness, access, and freedom of choice raised by the preceding vignettes. The authors clearly prefer the German or Canadian approaches to that of the US, but they give few clues on how to get there from here. Highly recommended. General; undergraduate. B. C. Stuart; Pennsylvania State University, University Park Campus

Based on a series originally published in the Philadelphia Inquirer , this short compilation takes the reader on an informative journey through three typical hospitals in the United States, Canada, and Germany. The authors, three Inquirer reporters, elegantly commingle the stories of individual doctors, patients, and hospital administrators with meaningful statistics in order to demonstrate the glaring differences in these three medical systems and their impact on all involved. After reading this book, one cannot help but better appreciate the frustration experienced by practitioner and patient alike and better understand the wasted resources so pervasive in the American medical system--two issues critical to successful reform efforts. Hard Choices provides a needed primer on the current health reform debate while offering viable and proven alternatives from which Americans, striving to build a new system, can learn. For all popular health collections.-- Karen A. Wolin, Univ. of Illinois at Chicago (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.