Overview

"Although managed health care is a hot topic, too few discussions focus on health care rationing - who lives and who dies, death versus dollars. In this book physician and bioethicist Peter A. Ubel argues that physicians, health insurance companies, managed care organizations and governments need to consider the cost-effectiveness of many new health care technologies. In particular, they need to think about how best to ration health care. Ubel believes that standard medical training should provide physicians with the expertise to decide when to withhold health care from patients. He discusses the moral questions raised by this position, and by health care rationing in general. He incorporates ethical arguments about the appropriate role of cost-effectiveness analysis in health care rationing, empirical research about how the general public wants to ration care, and clinical insights based on his practice of general internal medicine. Straddling the fields of ethics, economics, research psychology and clinical medicine, he moves the debate forward from ""whether"" to ration to ""how"" to ration. The discussion is enlivened by actual case studies."

Full Product Details

9780262710091

Table of Contents

Reviews

The style of writing is personal (first person), conversational, anecdotal, self-deprecatingly disarming, gently persuasive, and often very amusing. Alan Williams Health Economy

Ubel has made important contributions to our understanding of how people make choices about health care and of the factors that enter into these decisions. - Wallace F. Berman, M.D., New England Journal of Medicine

Author Information

Peter A. Ubel is Associate Professor in the Internal Medicine Department and Director of the Program for Improving Health Care Decisions at the University of Michigan Medical School. He is also staff physician at the Ann Arbor Veterans Affairs Medical Center.

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