Product Description

Drawing on personal experience in both the Canadian and U.S. systems, Dr. Gratzer shows how paternalistic government involvement in the health care system has multiplied inefficiencies, discouraged innovation, and punished patients. The Cure offers a detailed and practical approach to putting individuals back in charge. With an introduction by Milton Friedman, The Cure will be required reading for anyone who wants to know what is really wrong with the modern health care system.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383944 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 250 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781594032196
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From the Back Cover
"David Gratzer is a practicing psychiatrist who combines firsthand knowledge of medical practice in both his native Canada and the U.S. with an independent point of view and a rare capacity for lucid exposition of complex technical material. . . If you want a well-written, interesting yet authoritative and thorough account of what is wrong with medicine today and how to cure American health care, this is the book for you."

- Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate, Economics (from foreword to The Cure)

"The Cure is a must read for all students of health care policy. Dr. Gratzer correctly diagnoses the U.S. health care system's problems and proposes workable solutions to fix them. His ideas will help reign-in costs while, at the same time, preserve necessary incentives for quality-of-life enhancing innovations."

--John F. Cogan, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University

"David Gratzer's well written book should be in the reading list of anyone interested in health care reform. In five-sixths of the U.S economy, we look to markets as an organizing mechanism; in the one-sixth of the economy represented by health care, public policy has frustrated markets, with adverse consequences for cost, access, and quality. Gratzer's capitalist manifesto is a shot in the arm; with it, the much that's right with American health care can grow."

--R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School; and former Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

"The caduceus is an apt symbol for medicine, given the bureaucratic snake pit the American health care system has become. Dr. David Gratzer skillfully wields Occam's razor to shave away the Byzantine rhetoric and show us that the cure for health care comes in the simplest of formulas - free markets, less government meddling, and a healthy dose of capitalism."

--Governor Bill Owens, Colorado

"Dr. David Gratzer is uniquely qualified to diagnose and provide a treatment regimen for the US health care system's problems. In this book he performs this function for us, does it with his usual acumen and clarity. He leads us by the hand through the labyrinth of legal, institutional and regulatory events that brought to the point where, at least to some, we are in a health crisis that can only be solved by further movement away from the market and toward a universal centrally controlled system. He thoroughly debunks the notion we can improve the US health care system by becoming more like our neighbors to the North. After taking us there, he shows us why these same legal, institutional, and regulatory events are largely responsible for our predicament and that the popular solution of more of the same is not the answer. He convincingly demonstrates that the only way out is less regulation of, and more freedom for, the providers and customers of health care. This book should be read by anyone involved, or with the hope or potential to be involved, in determining health care policy."

--Tom Saving, Director, Private Enterprise Research Center at Texas A&M University.

"Excellent addition to the emerging call for empowering patients rather than government bureaucrats with control of the health care dollar, written by someone with an expert view from the inside!"

--Scott W. Atlas, MD, Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Professor, Stanford University School of Medicine

About the Author
David Gratzer, a licensed physician in the US and Canada, is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His research interests include Medicare and Medicaid, drug reimportation, and FDA reform.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman authored the foreword to Dr. Gratzer's newest book, referring to him as "a natural-born economist." In The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care (Encounter Books, October 2006), Dr. Gratzer offers a detailed overview of American health care and makes the case that it's possible to reduce health expenses, insure millions more, and improve quality of care without growing government or raising taxes.

Dr. Gratzer is the author of Code Blue: Reviving Canada's Health Care System (ECW Press, 1999) and is the editor of Better Medicine (ECW Press, 2002), a collection of essays from leading health care thinkers in North America and Europe. He is often quoted across North America and is frequently invited to speak on health reform. He has debated Congressman Gil Gutknecht on drug reimportation at the American Enterprise Institute, has testified before Congress on the Health Care Choice Act, and has keynoted the Long Island Health Care Summit after Senator Hillary Clinton cancelled because of a scheduling conflict. Dr. Gratzer has written for more than a dozen newspapers and magazines and is a peer reviewer for numerous publications and organizations.

Customer Reviews

Achieving the perfect orderliness of a soylent green society
David Gratzer's "The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care" is perhaps greatest paen ever written to the one true religion: laissez-faire capitalism. It's a celebration of the triumph of the bottom line, an adoration of profit, and a joyous prayer of hope for the perfect orderliness of a soylent green society.

Over the last 30 years, we've stood in awe as we've witnessed unregulated capitalism's transformative powers. Where once our edible ecology lacked such keystone species as E.coli and salmonella, our meat, fruit, vegetables, and water have become veritable Edens for those precious pathogens. Where once financial regulation checked glorious greed and encouraged the unbearable ennui that comes with stability, our new, deregulated, economic environment has brought excitement to investing and incredible profits to those few deserving oligarchs who were most prepared with the connections to exploit the system to their advantage.

Now, David Gratzer and the insurance industry wants to do the same for health care. He's heard the complaints. He's read studies like the 2004 Commonwealth Fund report which looked at satisfaction in five nations. He saw that they found that U.S. Americans were by far the most dissatisfied with their health care system (over twice as dissatisfied as Canadians)and less likely to receive care because of cost (17% of Canadians vs 40% of U.S. Americans).

Yes, he's studied it thoroughly and has decided that the problem with the U.S. system is that it is not capitalistic enough. It needs to be deregulated like the food and banking industries. The problem isn't lack of access, it's about deciding who deserves what level of care--it's about rationing health care by one's ability to pay.

Even more importantly, it's not a matter of whether someone can receive the care they need, but whether society will allow him or her to access a free market solution to pay for that service. Is our society advanced enough to provide a patient's loved ones an opportunity to sell their organs to pay for needed health care? Have we achieved that level of compassionate capitalism yet? Do the poor and working classes care enough about life to make sacrifices to preserve it? If not, do they really deserve all of the benefits of life?

These are the fundamental questions to which Gratzer alludes, but, unfortunately, fails to fully address in his book. That's a shame, because these are the questions that must be answered if we are ever to fully achieve the libertarian society he envisions.

That said, Gratzer does honor laissez-faire capitalism with the blind worship that it deserves as the answer to everything (along with lower taxes and drilling in the ANWR). That's why I'm giving his book four stars.

Well informed view from the trenches
I'm surprised to be the first to review The Cure, but it's a good enough book to have a review even if it has to be mine. I read this last week, along with Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care, by Arnold Kling. I enjoyed them both equally, would recommend both as suitable introductions to understanding the problems of our current health care system and frequently-proposed alternatives.

The strong point of this book is that the author is licensed in both the U.S. and Canadian health care systems, and very familiar with both. Proponents of alternatives to our current system often seem to overlook the fact that all existing alternative systems also have problems, which cannot be improved by mere ignorance.

Combining this book's real world experience with the Kling book's hard-headed focus on economics provides much to chew over in the debates surely about to begin again in the U.S.

Not impressed.
I gave this a shot, hoping to get a different perspective on the issue of health-care in the United States. Wasn't impressed with Gratzer's take. Some of his language seems too slanted. I understand the strategy of spinning a fact to serve one's argument, but he over-spins to the point of just being down right erroneous. For example on page 156 under "Safer Drugs" he writes the following: "Here's the FDA's dirty little secret: clinical trials involve a relatively homogenous group of healthy individuals who collectively are totally unrepresentative of the people who actually take pharmaceuticals." Uh, wouldn't that be the "dirty secret" of pharmaceutical companies and the CRO's employed to conduct clinical trials? This type of shabby spin, coupled with the sensationalist language ("dirty secrets"...come on) that made the book feel more like a prescription of propaganda. I'm just happy that I didn't spend money on this. Libraries are a good thing.