You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
One of the major concerns about the changing U.S. health-care systems is whether they will improve or diminish the quality and cost-effectiveness of medical care. The shift from a fee-for-service to a prepaid method of reimbursement has greatly changed the incentives of patients to seek care as well as those of providers to supply it. This change poses a particular challenge for care of depressed patients, a vulnerable population that often does not advocate for its own care. This book documents the inefficiencies of our national systems--prepaid as well as fee-for-service--for treating depression and explores how they can be improved. Although depression is a major illness affecting million...
First multi-year cumulation covers six years: 1965-70.
The United States spends greatly more per person on health care than any other country but the evidence shows that care is often poor and inappropriate. Despite expenditures of 1.7 trillion dollars in 2003, and growing substantially each year, services remain fragmented and poorly coordinated, and more than 46 million people are uninsured. Why can't America, with its vast array of resources, sophisticated technologies, superior medical research and educational institutions, and talented health care professionals, produce higher quality care and better outcomes? In The Truth about Health Care, David Mechanic explains how health care in America has evolved in ways that favor a myriad of econom...
professional-standards-review organizations (PSRO) in defining quality of care for the Medicare program; it is a "shared responsibility of health professionals and government to provide a reasonable basis for confidence that action will be taken, both to assess whether services meet professionally recognized standards and to correct any deficiencies that may be found" (p. 14). Similar pronouncements have been made for the quality assurance activities of the Department of Defense's CHAMPUS program and of the 1980s successor to the PSROs, the federally designated peer-review organizations (PROs), established to ensure quality and utilization-efficient care for Medicare. Links between the feder...
Measuring Functioning and Well-Being is a comprehensive account a broad range of self-reported functioning and well-being measures developed for the Medical Outcomes Study, a large-sale study of how patients fare with health care in the United States. This book provides a set of ready-to-use generic measures that are applicable to all adults, including those well and chronically ill, as well as a methodological guide to collecting health data and constructing health measures. As demand increases for more practical methods to monitor the outcomes of health care, this volume offers a timely and valuable contribution to the field. The contributors address conceptual and methodological issues in...
In the most important health insurance study ever conducted researchers at the RAND Corporation devised all experiment to address two key questions in health care financing: how much more medical care will people use if it is provided free of charge, and what are the consequences for their health? For three- or five-year periods the experiment measured both use and health outcomes in populations carefully selected to be representative of both urban and rural regions throughout the United States. Participants were enrolled in a range of insurance plans requiring different levels of copayment for medical care, from zero to 95 percent. The researchers found that in plans that reimbursed a highe...
This engaging Research Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of research on social factors and mental health, examining how important it is to consider the social context in which mental health issues arise, and are dealt with in the mental health care system. It illustrates how social factors affect the interactive process of psychiatric diagnosis and how society responds to people who are labelled as mentally ill.