Right Medicine: How to Make Health Care Reform Work Today (1994)

Can universal health care be obtained at an affordable price today? Drawing on many real-life medical case histories, David Cundiff, MD, and Mary Ellen McCarthy, PhD, develop in this innovative and highly readable book, The Right Medicine, a comprehensive, justly humane, and economically sound plan for the full and effective solution of the terrible crisis in today's American health care system. Here are the key steps that the authors - a practicing oncologist and an experienced health care financial analyst - believe will succeed in providing high-quality, cost effective, universal coverage for all Americans establish a single-payer system, thus avoiding employer mandates and dramatically lowering health care costs by radically downsizing both hospital and insurance bureaucracies; make preventive care a top priority. This will ultimately produce substantial new cost reductions as levels of health improve; establish a national program of local Community Wellness Centers for the coordination and delivery of health promotion and disease prevention services; restore the family physician to the traditional role in the medical system - thus renewing focus on the individual patient and reducing the overuse of specialists; encourage palliative (hospice) care for the terminally ill, thereby providing dignified, pain-free care and eliminating the excessive costs of current high-tech hospital death and establish strong incentives to adopt a healthy lifestyle by radically increasing taxes on alcohol, tobacco, dietary fat, firearms, violent media, and the wasteful uses of fossil fuels - taxes that will repay the heavy health care costs they impose. The Right Medicine proposes an eminently workable"win, win, win" program that will keep alive the promise of America the public wins with more appropriate and efficacious health care services at lower overall cost; the economy wins with more jobs through community wellness programs and more productive workers and health care wo