Since around 2005, I’ve attempted to learn the big picture of American healthcare while focusing on my little niche in the system. After 16 years (and several legislative bills with major changes), I find myself as befuddled by the economic organization as I was at the beginning. Before dying in 2017, Reinhardt was a leading voice in healthcare economics. A Canadian by citizenship and a German by birth but an American by living, he mastered the nuances of this field and weighed in on many big questions confronting America in this book.
Reinhardt had an uncanny ability always to keep people in the center of his economic analyses of healthcare. In the epilogue, his wife and research partner suspects this was because he and his siblings were sustained by the German socialized healthcare system as youth. As such, the first half of this book is dedicated to economics, and the second half, to ethics.
Two forewards are provided by liberal economist Paul Krugman and conservative US Senator and physician Bill Frist. This ideological breadth of respect bespeaks of how respected Reinhardt’s voice is. He is no mere partisan, but instead a scholar. He pragmatically and wisely contends that the Canadian and German health systems might not serve as good models for American democracy. He is skeptical of “Medicare-for-All” proposals. His advice tries to combine the better aspects of conservative and liberal proposals.
Importantly, he argues that one often-unstated question in American debates is most important. Do Americans want healthcare as a “social good” available for all or as an “economic good” accessible disproportionately by economic class? In speculating about what a commonly acceptable system would consist of, he laudably tries to find middle ground. Few voices in American society (in 2021) seem open to such middle ground on healthcare, so I welcome this approach.
Healthcare is the biggest economic segment in American society. As such, this short and readable book should be on the radar for intelligent, politically interested citizens. It has particular import for healthcare workers in a often confusing system. It presents the big quandary of the financials – the weakness of the system – without denigrating the quality work by physicians, nurses, technologists, and other contributors. Like any good economist, he advocates for evidence-based healthcare administration and specifies a better allocation of resources. This last testament of this luminous figure should be read to elevate the level of our social dialogue.
Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care
By Uwe E. Reinhardt
Copyright (c) 2019
Princeton University Press
ISBN13 9780691208534
Page Count: 201
Genre: Economics, Health Care
www.amazon.com