Lives at Risk - Introduction

Introduction

It begins by examining how three fundamental facts about health care systems.

  1. The potential exists to spend the entire US GDP on health care in useful ways.
  2. As time goes on, Americans desire to spend more of their income on health care.
  3. The US has suppressed normal market forces in dealing with 1 and 2.

The authors contend that Americans could potentially spend their entire GDP on medical testing alone. They further explain that as people become older and wealthier, they naturally spend more of their money on health care. They explain how the suppression of normal market forces, in conjunction with the first two facts, has created the problems currently faced with health care in the United States and abroad.

Read more about this topic:  Lives At Risk

Famous quotes containing the word introduction:

    “For better or worse, stepparenting is self-conscious parenting. You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.”
    —Anonymous Parent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)

    “The role of the stepmother is the most difficult of all, because you can’t ever just be. You’re constantly being tested—by the children, the neighbors, your husband, the relatives, old friends who knew the children’s parents in their first marriage, and by yourself.”
    —Anonymous Stepparent. Making It as a Stepparent, by Claire Berman, introduction (1980, repr. 1986)

    “For the introduction of a new kind of music must be shunned as imperiling the whole state; since styles of music are never disturbed without affecting the most important political institutions.”
    —Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)