front cover of The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World
The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World
Hall, Mark A
Rutgers University Press, 2012

The Health Care Safety Net in a Post-Reform World examines how national health care reform will impact safety net programs that serve low-income and uninsured patients. The “safety net” refers to the collection of hospitals, clinics, and doctors who treat disadvantaged people, including those without insurance, regardless of their ability to pay. Despite comprehensive national health care reform, over twenty million people will remain uninsured. And many of those who obtain insurance from reform will continue to face shortages of providers in their communities willing or able to serve them. As the demand for care grows with expanded insurance, so will the pressure on an overstretched safety net.

This book, with contributions from leading health care scholars, is the first comprehensive assessment of the safety net in over a decade. Rather than view health insurance and the health care safety net as alternatives to each other, it examines their potential to be complementary aspects of a broader effort to achieve equity and quality in health care access. It also considers whether the safety net can be improved and strengthened to a level that can provide truly universal access, both through expanded insurance and the creation of a well-integrated and reasonably supported network of direct health care access for the uninsured.

Seeing safety net institutions as key components of post-health care reform in the United States—as opposed to stop-gap measures or as part of the problem—is a bold idea. And as presented in this volume, it is an idea whose time has come.

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front cover of Medical Professionalism in the New Information Age
Medical Professionalism in the New Information Age
Edited and with an Introduction by David J. Rothman and David Blumenthal
Rutgers University Press, 2011
With computerized health information receiving unprecedented government support, a group of health policy scholars analyze the intricate legal, social, and professional implications of the new technology. These essays explore how Health Information Technology (HIT) may alter relationships between physicians and patients, physicians and other providers, and physicians and their home institutions. Patient use of web-based information may undermine the traditional information monopoly that physicians have long enjoyed. New IT systems may increase physicians' legal liability and heighten expectations about transparency. Case studies on kidney transplants and maternity practices reveal the unanticipated effects, positive and negative, of patient uses of the new technology. An independent HIT profession may emerge, bringing another organized interest into the medical arena. Taken together, these investigations cast new light on the challenges and opportunities presented by HIT.
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front cover of Methods in Medical Ethics
Methods in Medical Ethics
Second Edition
Jeremy Sugarman, MD, and Daniel P. Sulmasy, OFM, MD, Editors
Georgetown University Press, 2013

Medical ethics draws upon methods from a wide array of disciplines, including anthropology, economics, epidemiology, health services research, history, law, medicine, nursing, philosophy, psychology, sociology, and theology.

In this influential book, outstanding scholars in medical ethics bring these many methods together in one place to be systematically described, critiqued, and challenged. Newly revised and updated chapters in this second edition include philosophy, religion and theology, virtue and professionalism, casuistry and clinical ethics, law, history, qualitative research, ethnography, quantitative surveys, experimental methods, and economics and decision science. This second edition also includes new chapters on literature and sociology, as well as a second chapter on philosophy which expands the range of philosophical methods discussed to include gender ethics, communitarianism, and discourse ethics. In each of these chapters, contributors provide descriptions of the methods, critiques, and notes on resources and training.

Methods in Medical Ethics is a valuable resource for scholars, teachers, editors, and students in any of the disciplines that have contributed to the field. As a textbook and reference for graduate students and scholars in medical ethics, it offers a rich understanding of the complexities involved in the rigorous investigation of moral questions in medical practice and research.

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