All advanced health care systems face severe difficulties in financing the delivery of today's sophisticated medical care. In this study David Wilsford compares the health systems in France and the United States to demonstrate that some political systems are considerably more effective at controlling the cost of care than others. He argues that two variables--the autonomy of the state and the strength and cohesiveness of organized medicine--explain this variance. In France, Wilsford shows, the state is strong in the health policy domain, while organized medicine is weak and divided. Consequently, physicians exercise little influence over health care policymaking. By contrast, in the United States the state is weak, the employers and insurers who pay for health care are fragmented, and organized medicine is strong and well financed. As a result, medical professionals are able to exert a greater influence on policymaking, thus making cost control more difficult. Wilsford extends his comparison to health care systems in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Italy, Canada, and Japan. Whether the private or public sector finances health care, he discovers, there is now an important trend in all of the advanced industrial countries toward controlling escalating costs by curbing both the medical profession's clinical autonomy and physicians' incomes.

After the American Revolution, the new republic's most prominent physicians envisioned a society in which doctors, lawyers, and the state might work together to ensure public well-being and a high standard of justice. But as James C. Mohr reveals in Doctors and the Law, what appeared to be fertile ground for cooperative civic service soon became a battlefield, as the relationship between doctors and the legal system became increasingly adversarial. Mohr provides a graceful and lucid account of this prfound shift from civic republicanism to marketplace professionalism. He shows how, by 1900, doctors and lawyers were at each other's throats, medical jurisprudence had disappeared as a serious field of study for American physicians, the subject of insanity had become a legal nightmare, expert medical witnesses had become costly and often counterproductive, and an ever-increasing number of malpractice suits had intensified physicians' aversion to the courts. In short, the system we have taken largely for granted throughout the twentieth century had been established. Doctors and the Law is a penetrating look at the origins of our inherited medico-legal system.

In the summer of 1964 medical professionals, mostly white and northern, organized the Medical Committee for Human Rights (MCHR) to provide care and support for civil rights activists organizing black voters in Mississippi. They left their lives and lucrative private practices to march beside and tend the wounds of demonstrators from Freedom Summer, the March on Selma, and the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968. Galvanized and sometimes radicalized by their firsthand view of disenfranchised communities, the MCHR soon expanded its mission to encompass a range of causes from poverty to the war in Vietnam. They later took on the whole of the United States healthcare system. MCHR doctors soon realized fighting segregation would mean not just caring for white volunteers, but also exposing and correcting shocking inequalities in segregated health care. They pioneered community health plans and brought medical care to underserved or unserved areas. Though education was the most famous battleground for integration, the appalling injustice of segregated health care levelled equally devastating consequences. Award-winning historian John Dittmer, author of the classic civil rights history Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, has written an insightful and moving account of a group of idealists who put their careers in the service of the motto “Health Care Is a Human Right.”

Since Roe v. Wade, abortion has continued to be a divisive political issue in the United States. In contrast, it has remained primarily a medical issue in Britain and Canada despite the countries’ shared heritage. Doctors and Demonstrators looks beyond simplistic cultural or religious explanations to find out why abortion politics and policies differ so dramatically in these otherwise similar countries. Drew Halfmann argues that political institutions are the key. In the United States, federalism, judicial review, and a private health care system contributed to the public definition of abortion as an individual right rather than a medical necessity. Meanwhile, Halfmann explains, the porous structure of American political parties gave pro-choice and pro-life groups the opportunity to move the issue onto the political agenda. A groundbreaking study of the complex legal and political factors behind the evolution of abortion policy, Doctors and Demonstrators will be vital for anyone trying to understand this contentious issue.

"The Nation has lost sight of its public health goals and has allowed the system of public health to fall into 'disarray'," from The Future of Public Health. This startling book contains proposals for ensuring that public health service programs are efficient and effective enough to deal not only with the topics of today, but also with those of tomorrow. In addition, the authors make recommendations for core functions in public health assessment, policy development, and service assurances, and identify the level of government--federal, state, and local--at which these functions would best be handled.

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within eighteen seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong—with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make. Groopman explores why doctors err and shows when and how they can—with our help—avoid snap judgments, embrace uncertainty, communicate effectively, and deploy other skills that can profoundly impact our health. This book is the first to describe in detail the warning signs of erroneous medical thinking and reveal how new technologies may actually hinder accurate diagnoses. How Doctors Think offers direct, intelligent questions patients can ask their doctors to help them get back on track. Groopman draws on a wealth of research, extensive interviews with some of the country’s best doctors, and his own experiences as a doctor and as a patient. He has learned many of the lessons in this book the hard way, from his own mistakes and from errors his doctors made in treating his own debilitating medical problems. How Doctors Think reveals a profound new view of twenty-first-century medical practice, giving doctors and patients the vital information they need to make better judgments together.

Collaborations of physicians and researchers with industry can provide valuable benefits to society, particularly in the translation of basic scientific discoveries to new therapies and products. Recent reports and news stories have, however, documented disturbing examples of relationships and practices that put at risk the integrity of medical research, the objectivity of professional education, the quality of patient care, the soundness of clinical practice guidelines, and the public's trust in medicine. Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice provides a comprehensive look at conflict of interest in medicine. It offers principles to inform the design of policies to identify, limit, and manage conflicts of interest without damaging constructive collaboration with industry. It calls for both short-term actions and long-term commitments by institutions and individuals, including leaders of academic medical centers, professional societies, patient advocacy groups, government agencies, and drug, device, and pharmaceutical companies. Failure of the medical community to take convincing action on conflicts of interest invites additional legislative or regulatory measures that may be overly broad or unduly burdensome. Conflict of Interest in Medical Research, Education, and Practice makes several recommendations for strengthening conflict of interest policies and curbing relationships that create risks with little benefit. The book will serve as an invaluable resource for individuals and organizations committed to high ethical standards in all realms of medicine.