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Austin Frakt's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Austin Frakt recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Austin Frakt's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1
The problems of medical care confront us daily: a bureaucracy that makes a trip to the doctor worse than a trip to the dentist, doctors who can't practice medicine the way they choose, more than 40 million people without health insurance. "Medical care is in crisis," we are repeatedly told, and so it is. Barely one in five Americans thinks the medical system works well.Enter David M. Cutler, a Harvard economist who served on President Clinton's health care task force and later advised presidential candidate Bill Bradley. One of the nation's leading experts on the subject, Cutler argues in... more
Recommended by Austin Frakt, and 1 others.

Austin FraktI suggested this book because it raises some very important points about healthcare spending in the US. We spend a lot, and it’s generally believed there is a lot of waste. There are a lot of things we could cut, or ways we could save on spending that wouldn’t harm health. Looking internationally suggests that this must be true. But even so, Cutler’s argument is that we do receive great value... (Source)

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2
Medicare is quickly approaching insolvency, in Chapter because the program pays too much for the services it provides. In Bring Market Prices to Medicare, Robert Coulam, Roger Feldman, and Bryan E. Dowd propose a groundbreaking solution: Use market-based arrangements to set prices for Medicare plans. The authors contend that the federal government should pay only the cost of the most economical health plan in each market area. To accomplish this, both traditional fee-for-service (FFS) Medicare and private Medicare Advantage (MA) would submit bids for the government's business; the federal... more
Recommended by Austin Frakt, and 1 others.

Austin FraktOne of the perennial debates about Medicare is how much we should support the participation of private plans, and how much we should make it a public-only programme. It started as just a public health insurance programme. All the bills were paid directly by the federal government, it was a uniform national benefit and there was no choice: You’re on Medicare, everyone is in the same programme,... (Source)

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3
In no other country has health care served as such a volatile flashpoint of ideological conflict. America has endured a century of rancorous debate on health insurance, and despite the passage of legislation in 2010, the battle is not yet over. This book is a history of how and why the United States became so stubbornly different in health care, presented by an expert with unsurpassed knowledge of the issues.

Tracing health-care reform from its beginnings to its current uncertain prospects, Paul Starr argues that the United States ensnared itself in a trap through policies that...
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Recommended by Austin Frakt, and 1 others.

Austin FraktYes. It’s mostly focused on the last several decades, and relatively more attention is paid as we get closer to the present, including the most recent healthcare reform effort. Quite a lot of it is on the Clinton effort as well. It’s really about more modern development of health policy in the US and the policy rationale for the 2010 health reform law. It includes much of the politics that were... (Source)

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4
Winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the Bancroft Prize in American History, this is a landmark history of how the entire American health care system of doctors, hospitals, health plans, and government programs has evolved over the last two centuries.

"The definitive social history of the medical profession in America....A monumental achievement."—H. Jack Geiger, M.D., New York Times Book Review
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Recommended by Austin Frakt, and 1 others.

Austin FraktThis is a very long, detailed book, and it’s not all that easy for someone who is not deeply into health policy and healthcare to relate it to today. Its purpose is to describe the broad sweep of the history of healthcare in America, through to about 1980. It was published in 1982 so it’s not even that current. But it’s necessary reading for anybody who fancies themselves as a health policy wonk... (Source)

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5

Inside National Health Reform

This indispensable guide to the Affordable Care Act, our new national health care law, lends an insider’s deep understanding of policy to a lively and absorbing account of the extraordinary—and extraordinarily ambitious—legislative effort to reform the nation’s health care system. Dr. John E. McDonough, DPH, a health policy expert who served as an advisor to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, provides a vivid picture of the intense effort required to bring this legislation into law. McDonough clearly explains the ACA’s inner workings, revealing the rich landscape of the issues, policies, and... more
Recommended by Austin Frakt, and 1 others.

Austin FraktThis is really two books in one. John McDonough is an insider. He was an adviser to Senator [Ted] Kennedy’s HELP committee, which was one of the two big committees in the Senate that wrote the health reform law. He was in a lot of meetings, talked to a lot of people, and tells wonderful stories about negotiations over the minutiae of the health law. It’s suspenseful and interesting to see how... (Source)

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