In this penetrating analysis, Bradford Gray tackles the thorny issues surrounding the question of to whom and for what our physicians and hospitals are accountable. This book provides a careful evaluation of the mechanisms of accountability that have developed along with a growing profit orientation of health care, and it alerts us to keep a sharp eye focused on who is looking out for the interests of the patient.

Most businesses are driven to maximize profit, but what does this drive really mean in action? In Profit Motive: What Drives the Things We Do economist Charles Sauer makes the case that identifying your own and others’ “Profit Motives” provides the foundation for running a successful business, being an effective leader, a good consumer, and getting what you really want out of life. In this highly praised new treatise on economic behavior, Sauer examines how businesses make decisions in pricing and employment and how the search for long-term profit can mean adopting practices that may seem contrary to fundamental capitalist principles. But the Profit Motive analysis goes well beyond the realm of finance and corporate decision-making to explain how gaining a profit, or a benefit, is the motivating force behind an endless array of choices made by everyone from large organizations to individuals and their families―and everything in between.

"[This book is] the most authoritative assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of recent trends toward the commercialization of health care," says Robert Pear of The New York Times. This major study by the Institute of Medicine examines virtually all aspects of for-profit health care in the United States, including the quality and availability of health care, the cost of medical care, access to financial capital, implications for education and research, and the fiduciary role of the physician. In addition to the report, the book contains 15 papers by experts in the field of for-profit health care covering a broad range of topicsâ€"from trends in the growth of major investor-owned hospital companies to the ethical issues in for-profit health care. "The report makes a lasting contribution to the health policy literature." â€"Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

Medicine in the United States is big business. We spend 50 percent more on health care per capita than other developed countries, but a multitude of measures indicate that we are not getting health-care value for our money. In Too Big to Succeed, author Dr. Russell J. Andrews details why health care in America has become more expensive but less effective and outlines a new paradigm for health-care delivery. Too Big to Succeed describes how American medicine is on an unsustainable course: costs are increasing while benefits are deteriorating in comparison with other developed nations. Beginning with the Hippocratic Oath and the the premedical student, Andrews traces the myriad ways in which the profit motive has infiltrated American medicineincluding medical school training, current models of health-care delivery, medical professional societies, medical research, and medical drug and device development. Presenting an insiders look into the current crisis in health care, Andrews demonstrates that until both the physician and the patient return to the relationship that underlies medicine, physicians will not experience the joy of healing those who seek their help and patients will not appreciate that a good physician is a permanent part of their lives.

In America today, a public official's lawful income consists of a salary. But until a century ago, the law frequently authorized officials to make money on a profit-seeking basis. Prosecutors won a fee for each defendant convicted. Tax collectors received a cut of each evasion uncovered. Naval officers took a reward for each ship sunk. The list goes on. This book is the first to document American government's "for-profit" past, to discover how profit-seeking defined officials' relationship to the citizenry, and to explain how lawmakers-by banishing the profit motive in favor of the salary-transformed that relationship forever.

Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides--which are often indistinguishable. In this book, the author teases out the distinctions and differences, revealing the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners. Exploring the National Institutes of Health's annual budget, the inflated estimates of health care cost savings that result from research, the high prices charged by drug companies, the use and misuse of human subjects for medical testing, and the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research, he clarifies the fine line between doing good and doing harm in the name of medical progress. His work shows that medical research must be understood in light of other social and economic needs and how even the research imperative, dedic.