The Healthcare Labyrinth: A Guide to Navigating Health Plans and Fixing American Health Insurance


Book Description

The Healthcare Labyrinth is not just a comprehensive guide to navigating health plans--it offers a blueprint for fixing our broken healthcare system. The American health insurance system is anything but simple to maneuver. Health plan enrollees become entangled in an intricate and opaque maze of confusion, often resulting in frustration, regret, and deep debt. In The Healthcare Labyrinth, health plan and healthcare technology veteran Marc S. Ryan seeks to demystify the U.S. healthcare system, helping Americans become wiser consumers and allowing them to navigate the maze with more confidence and certainty. Marc walks through how the current system operates, tracing the dysfunction, high costs, and lack of quality to three major issues: --a lack of affordable universal access; --little focus on wellness, prevention, and care management; and --outrageous pricing, especially compared to other developed nations. Using his decades of experience, Marc outlines a bipartisan blueprint to transform America's unique system without upending the employer-based system. He relies on leading academic, research, and mainstream media sources from across the political spectrum to examine the U.S. healthcare system and compare it to those of other developed nations.







The Medicare Handbook


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Medical and Dental Expenses


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The Affordable Care Act


Book Description

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) was designed to increase health insurance quality and affordability, lower the uninsured rate by expanding insurance coverage, and reduce the costs of healthcare overall. Along with sweeping change came sweeping criticisms and issues. This book explores the pros and cons of the Affordable Care Act, and explains who benefits from the ACA. Readers will learn how the economy is affected by the ACA, and the impact of the ACA rollout.










Coverage Matters


Book Description

Roughly 40 million Americans have no health insurance, private or public, and the number has grown steadily over the past 25 years. Who are these children, women, and men, and why do they lack coverage for essential health care services? How does the system of insurance coverage in the U.S. operate, and where does it fail? The first of six Institute of Medicine reports that will examine in detail the consequences of having a large uninsured population, Coverage Matters: Insurance and Health Care, explores the myths and realities of who is uninsured, identifies social, economic, and policy factors that contribute to the situation, and describes the likelihood faced by members of various population groups of being uninsured. It serves as a guide to a broad range of issues related to the lack of insurance coverage in America and provides background data of use to policy makers and health services researchers.




Care Without Coverage


Book Description

Many Americans believe that people who lack health insurance somehow get the care they really need. Care Without Coverage examines the real consequences for adults who lack health insurance. The study presents findings in the areas of prevention and screening, cancer, chronic illness, hospital-based care, and general health status. The committee looked at the consequences of being uninsured for people suffering from cancer, diabetes, HIV infection and AIDS, heart and kidney disease, mental illness, traumatic injuries, and heart attacks. It focused on the roughly 30 million-one in seven-working-age Americans without health insurance. This group does not include the population over 65 that is covered by Medicare or the nearly 10 million children who are uninsured in this country. The main findings of the report are that working-age Americans without health insurance are more likely to receive too little medical care and receive it too late; be sicker and die sooner; and receive poorer care when they are in the hospital, even for acute situations like a motor vehicle crash.