Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach

by Thomas Bodenheimer, Kevin Grumbach

Understand how the healthcare system works – and how you can succeed in it

The Seventh Edition of Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach remains the most trusted and comprehensive guide to healthcare available and provides everything you need to build a solid foundation on the field’s most critical issues. This concise and engaging textbook clearly explains the all major aspects of healthcare, including finance, organization, and reimbursement. It will help you develop a clearer, more systematic way of thinking about health care in the United States, its problems, and the alternatives for managing and solving these problems.

The book features a unique approach, using clinical vignettes to highlight key policy issues, clarify difficult concepts, and demonstrate how they apply to real-world situations, affecting both patients and professionals alike. Expert practitioners in both the public and private healthcare sectors, the authors cover the entire scope of our healthcare system. They carefully weave key principles, descriptions, and concrete examples into chapters that make important health policy issues interesting and understandable.

Understanding Health Policy makes otherwise difficult concepts easy to understand—so you can make better decisions, improve outcomes, and enact positive change on a daily basis.

The Seventh Edition features:

Updated throughout to reflect the latest changes and events, including additional content on value-based care, Choosing Wisely®, etc. Expanded coverage of the impact of the Affordable Care Act, including Accountable Care Organizations and their impact, and global issues in health policy End-of-chapter summaries and comprehensive lists of review questions to reinforce what you have learned Includes "Questions and Discussion Topics" for classroom or individual study

Genres: Health Care, Health, Medicine, Textbooks, Nonfiction, School

241 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 15, 2012

Reviews

[YouMo Mi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent primer on health care policy in the U.S., namely, structure, economics/financing, history, legislation/reforms, comparisons to other nations, and current challenges. I had read "Healing of America" by TR Reid. While that book was an interesting read, I felt too much of it was anecdotal and either assumed and/or ignored the details of health care economics and policy that are necessary to understand where the US has gone wrong. Bodenheimer's book cites numerous studies and statistics to back up any facts or assertions he makes.

The heart of the book is really Chapters 13-17, which all the previous chapters help build a foundation to properly understand. Here, medical ethics (and its relationship with economics) are discussed, legislative history (including Obama's) and its consequences analyzed, competing interests broken down (providers/suppliers/purchasers, which can vary from HMOs, the gov't, citizens, physicians, hospitals), and the inherent and often difficult to resolve conflicts between these various players.

Necessary read for anyone interested in having a comprehensive foundation for understanding and discussing health care policy.

On a side note, this was the first Kindle book I (reluctantly) purchased from the Amazon store. I must say the ability to read anywhere on my smartphone and annotate/highlight to my heart's desire makes me more inclined to purchase e-books in the future.

[zzzoe.k · Rating 4 out of 5]

well, for a textbook, it was good, i suppose :/ In all seriousness, it was comprehensive and easy to understand and I didn't want to kill myself reading it, which is the major textbook benchmark.

[Lizzie Sawdai · Rating 3 out of 5]

Adding it to the old good reads because I did read the whole textbook. Enjoyable? No. But I did learn a lot about systems of health care.

[Chris Strangeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book as supplemental resding for a graduate level course in Public Policy regarding topics in health care. I generally despise textbooks, but this one is not bad--short and easily digestible, serving as a solid reference.

[Christopher Bailey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really well written text book. Extremely informative and useful.

[Matt "The Bibliognost" · Rating 3 out of 5]

Presented with a heavy left-leaning slant... but what did I expect? The author is in the field of public health, and a professor at UCSF.

[Eileen Schlaudt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clear textbook. Useful material.

[Matthew Gaines · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my more boring reads. I polished this one off the other day.

Thought it was very well written and liked the two practitioners who wrote it from a “this is what actually happens” view

[Al · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent way to understand the broken, fragmented US healthcare market. Recommend to anyone looking to better understand where we are and why. Something I will go back to as great reference.

[gaby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great basic overview of the health care system in the U.S. and its development over time. Good cross-national comparisons with Western European systems and Japan. This is a quick read, best suited for people without a ton of background in the structure of the U.S. health care delivery system. Would definitely recommend use in an undergraduate or masters level course, or for the interested citizen!

[Ahmad · Rating 5 out of 5]

A really good book to start. With lots of examples to simplify the meanings. It's main focus is on the US HCS.