Changing U.S. health care

by Eli Ginzberg

"The decade of the 1980s promised basic reform in the provision of health care services. Ronald Reagan, newly elected to the presidency on a pledge to minimize the role of government in domestic affairs, committed his administration to the pursuit of freemarket strategies as the panacea for the costliness and inefficiency besetting the nation's health care system. Official and private rhetoric was replete with proposals for systemic change fueled by the competitive forces that would be unleashed by deregulation." "Once the federal government yielded its long-held place as innovator and reformer, it was inevitable that the states would be catapulted into positions of greater prominence in the shaping of health care policy. This book assesses the changes that have actually occurred in the U.S.^ health care system, analyzing the nation's four largest metropolitan centers, which together with their states account for 74 million persons, or roughly one-third of the nation's population." "Th