Purchasing Population Health: Paying for Results

By David A. Kindig

Book Overview

The fundamental assertion of this book is that population health improvement will not be achieved until appropriate financial incentives are designed for this outcome.This one sentence summarizes the message of David Kindig's book, which directly addresses the current turbulence in health care and the lack of focus on value for all public and private investments to improve health. This proposal for a new health outcome purchasing standard is derived from Dr. Kindig's training as a physician and his experience in public and private health care management. While intended to address the cost, quality, and access goals of the failed federal reform effort of 1994, it envisions using health outcomes as a public- and private-sector purchasing standard for medical care as well as other health-promoting sectors such as educationand the environment.In language accessible to public and corporate policymakers, Kindig summarizes the vast technical literature in the areas of health outcomes and quality measurement, the determinants of health, health economics, rationing, and vertical integration. Drawing from the literature familiar to faculty and students in the health professions and business, this book will serve to inform a lay readership concerned about health care quality and expenditures.While based on research evidence, the final two chapters, "Making It Happen" and "The Case for Action, the Price of Inertia" outline how the ideas in this book can actually be put to work for the health and benefit of all in the twenty-first century.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 047210893X
• ISBN13: 9780472108930
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Length: 216 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Well written, innovative strategies for health care delivery

Dr. Kindig examines the current paradigm of health care delivery in the United States and offers well developed, innovative strategies for re-thinking our current situation. Through his application of in-depth economic analysis of medical care in this and other countries, and his willingness to look difficult problems squarely in the face, he asserts a host of long term policy and economic objectives which policy makers would do well to study. His ideas are not easy to implement, but we are quickly approaching a critical period of health care delivery which demands difficult answers.