The Health Care Mess

How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get Out

Julius B. Richmond

Rashi Fein

Foreword by Jimmy Carter

    If we can decode the human genome and fashion working machines out of atoms, why can't we navigate the quagmire that is our health care system? In this important new book, Julius Richmond and Rashi Fein recount the fraught history of health care in America since the 1960s. After the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and with the progressive goal to make advances in medical care available to all, medical costs began their upward spiral. Cost control measures failed and led to the HMO revolution, turning patients into consumers and doctors into providers. The swelling ranks of Americans without any insurance at all dragged the United States to the bottom of the list of industrialized nations.

    Over the last century medical education was also profoundly transformed into today's powerful triumvirate of academic medical centers, schools of medicine and public health, and research programs, all of which have shaped medical practice and medical care. The authors show how the promises of medical advances have not been matched either by financing or by delivery of care.

    As a new crisis looms, and the existing patchwork of insurance is poised to unravel, American leaders must again take up the question of health care. This book brings the voice of reason and the promise of compromise to that debate.

  • Cover: The Health Care Mess
  • A photo of the author

Julius Richmond, MD (left) and Professor Rashi Fein (right), photo by Liza Green, HMS Media Services, copyright 2004 President and Fellows of Harvard College, all rights reserved

Julius B. Richmond, M.D, is a founder of Head Start and the former Surgeon General under President Jimmy Carter. He is currently the John D. MacArthur Professor of Health Policy, Emeritus, at Harvard University.

Rashi Fein, Ph.D., is Professor of Medical Economics, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School, and the author of Medical Care, Medical Costs: The Search for a Health Insurance Policy.

Jimmy Carter is Former President of the United States and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.