The Painful Prescription: Rationing Hospital Care

by Henry J. Aaron and William B. Schwartz

Book Overview

In this book Aaron and Schwartz examine how the British have made those choices and draw inferences about how Americans would respond should they undertake to sharply reduce growth of medical spending. After describing the British health care system, they examine ten important medical procedures, comparing the British and American levels of care.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0815700342
• ISBN13: 9780815700340
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Length: 161 Pages

Customer Reviews

Timely reading (health care reform)

I stumbled across this title in the NYT obits, a few weeks ago, when its author died. It is relevant, timely reading, right now, when we are in this health-care reform flurry. Not that anyone actually responsible for legislating the reform would read it (or hardly anything, for that matter -- busy, busy, busy), but we upon whom it is going to fall can maybe see what is inevitably coming, and why. It's a Brookings Institution title. That's one of those think-tanks, right? Dunno if they're of some "stripe" or not. No matter. The book seems relevant to me, right now. I do Medicare counseling on the side. My interest in how things work, and why, just keeps growing, though, as Solomon said, "increasing knowledge results in increasing pain." We're not in a perfect world.