Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System

by Daniel Callahan

Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone?
In Taming the Beloved Beast , esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst.
Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.

Genres: Politics, Health Care

267 pages, Hardcover

First published August 17, 2009

Reviews

[Deanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I believe strongly in the premises of this book of health care economics, that we spend entirely too much money on delaying and prolonging death for a few months and far too little on the health of young people. We also worship the ability to make a profit, and therefore have allowed it to take over an "industry" instead of forbidding profit-taking from the suffering of our populace. However, this is a book of economics, and it took me months to read it because it was dry and somewhat repetitive, thus I could only give it three stars. That doesn't mean it wasn't worth reading -- although a shorter, more concise rendering making the same points should be required reading for anyone who has input into the health care decisions in our country. And that would be all of us, since we all vote.

[Joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

What's missing in most discussions of health care and cost is not missing from this book. Our underlying values take us in the direction of increasing cost by emphasizing a war against death, technology as a savior, and an inability to make decisions for the good of the population. This is a very good exploration of these issues. And it is the main reason that we make little progress.