Understanding health policy : a clinical approach / Thomas Bodenheimer, Kevin Grumbach, and Rachel Willard-Grace.

"A Lange medical book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: the strengths and weaknesses of US health care -- Section I: Financing and payment - how money moves -- Paying for health care -- Health insurance and access to health care -- Paying health care providers -- Section II: Equity and resource allocation -- Health equity -- Medical ethics and rationing of health care -- Section III: The organization of health care -- How health care is organized-I: primary, secondary and tertiary care -- How health care is organized-II: health care delivery systems -- The health care workforce and the education of health professionals -- Long-term care -- Section IV: Cost, quality, and value -- Painful versus painless cost control -- Mechanisms for controlling costs -- Quality of health care -- Population health and disease prevention -- Section V: The political economy of health care -- Health care in four nations -- Health care reform and national health insurance -- The business of US health care -- Section VI: Conclusion and study guide -- Conclusion: tensions and challenges -- Questions to assess understanding.

"This is a book about health policy as well as individual patients and caregivers and how they interact with each other and with the overall health system. When treating a patient's illness, health expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product or variations in surgical rates between one city and another seem remote if not irrelevant-but they are neither remote nor irrelevant. Health policy affects the patients we see on a daily basis. Managed care referral rules determine which specialist will see a patient; coverage gaps in the Medicare benefit package affects access to care for the elderly. Understanding Health Policy hopes to bridge the gap separating the microworld of individual patient care and the macrouniverse of health policy"-- Provided by publisher.