San Antonio College Library

Wall Street Journal reporter George Anders explains why managed care is so appealing to employers and insurers and how HMO bureaucrats can thwart necessary, even life-saving treatment under the guise of cost efficiency. Health Against Wealth takes an unflinching look at the profit-hungry entrepreneurs who have poured into this new "health industry" and provides alarming examples of political manipulation by increasingly powerful HMO lobbyists. At...

The struggle to perform well is universal: each of us faces fatigue, limited resources, and imperfect abilities in whatever we do. But nowhere is this drive to do better more important than in medicine, where lives are on the line with every decision. Author Gawande explores how doctors strive to close the gap between best intentions and best performance in the face of obstacles that sometimes seem insurmountable. Gawande's stories take us to battlefield...

Baker argues that the conventional wisdom about the medical malpractice crisis is a myth, and "the real problem is too much medical malpractice, not too much litigation." He contends that research shows that amounts paid for auto liability, workers' compensation, and product liability insurance dwarf the amounts paid for medical malpractice insurance, which represent less than 1 percent of health care costs. Only 3 percent of medical malpractice victims...

The book relates the findings of the National Institute of Medicine's Committee for Understanding and Eliminating Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care. The findings show that racial and ethnic minorities tend to receive a lower quality of healthcare in the United States than do non-minorities.