Ensuring America's Health explains why the US health care system offers world-class medical services to some patients but is also exceedingly costly with fragmented care, poor distribution, and increasingly bureaucratized processes. Based on exhaustive historical research, this work traces how public and private power merged to favor a distinctive economic model that places insurance companies at the center of the system, where they both finance and oversee medical care. Although the insurance company model was created during the 1930s, it continues to drive health care cost and quality...

This book provides an in-depth evaluation of the US health care system's development in the twentieth century.