Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System
✍ Scribed by Ana Teresa Gouveia
- Book ID
- 102286906
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2006
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 79 KB
- Volume
- 5
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1524-6817
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
This book is a first-rate introduction to the current debate on provision, use, and costs of health care. It offers, in engaging and clear language, a well-crafted crash course on health economics. Counselors will benefit from an opportunity to read "outside the box" and reflect on counseling as part of the larger health care system. This book will help counselors become more informed on health care and insurance issues and, hence, better advocates for their clients' needs and for their organizations' mission.
The book delineates important facts and procedures that affect practice, such as costs of administration, outreach, rationing, regulation, and utilization review. Although technical, the book is permeated with a profound sense of human solidarity and concern for persons who are disadvantaged and at risk. The author points to bureaucracy, frustrations, restrictions, and paradoxes of health care. Spending is too high, limitations are too stringent, costs increase, access to care is restricted, difficulties for the uninsured abound, and people fear becoming uninsured. These issues should lead counselors and administrators to review practices in their organizations and how they, as professionals, interface with their client population.
Examples of the contents included in several chapters follow. Chapter 1 addresses the meanings of health and how they have changed throughout history and in the lifetime of current readers. The increase in life expectancy and the survival of low-birth-weight infants generate new populations waiting for provision of services. Mental health problems are now being recognized for their impact on quality of life and, thus, are more frequently