"The Managed Healthcare Industry--A Market Failure," by Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz, examines the past 40 years of healthcare insurance leading to the Affordable Care Act
RYE, N. Y. (MMD Newswire) July 10, 2012 -- Now that the Supreme Court decided the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, the founding medical director of Rye Hospital Center, Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz shows how the insurance industry has moved from promised healthcare coverage for the general public to the managed denial of care for them while harvesting premium profits.
In this 2012 expanded second edition of "The Managed Healthcare Industry--A Market Failure" (ISBN 1439280614), Dr. Schoenholtz analyzes the past four decades where legislative and economic changes caused healthcare in the U.S. to become unsustainably costly, and Americans to have both a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rate than that of the 33 largest industrial nations.
Professor Schoenholtz explains why special companies were at first created outside of the "business of insurance" to manage the delivery of healthcare, and how these organizations either failed to thrive or ended up swallowed by the shrinking group of today's giant insurers and HMOs. The book also shows how insurers lobbied state and federal governments pretending to save on healthcare costs and "improving" healthcare but were in fact misinforming employers and patients, and preying on them and their doctors with unhealthy, coercive incentives that created a "failed market."
This unique textbook looks at the beginning of the healthcare "cost-containment" era, when HMOs were first introduced, goes on to demonstrate how previous administrations have used the federal antitrust laws and the Supreme Court to shield the insurance and managed-healthcare industries. He pays particular attention to the 1974 enactment of ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, to give readers a better understanding of the origins of company benefit plans and the role of privatized, managed Medicare and Medicaid.
"I shed light on the arcane healthcare insurance industry from its inception until our current situation," says Dr. Schoenholtz. "The book examines the ethics of doctors involved in externally managed care and scrutinizes the fundamentals of the historic new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and how it will actually work for the United States with its Exchanges, expanded Medicaid, and Accountable Care Organizations."
Schoenholtz shows readers how the Affordable Care Act can reduce expensive healthcare costs for employers, too, while still upholding promised benefits for their employees and all the country's citizens alike. By weaving together political, social and economic information, his book offers the only comprehensive approach to this timely debate.
Charles U. Daly, Director Emeritus of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation says, "Then I started reading. I was hooked. You have created a thoughtful, useful and comprehensive analysis of a sick mental care system that is overpriced, ineffective and unjust. Long, long ago I worked on congressional relations with the West Wing of Kennedy's and then Johnson's White house. We struggled to round up the votes needed to make significant changes in health care. We failed, as did our successors, until Obama appeared on the scene to once again press the issue. So thanks for a fine piece of work that should be read and heeded by all concerned."
"The Managed Healthcare Industry--A Market Failure," (CreateSpace, N. Charleston, SC, February 18, 2012, 602 pp.) is available at online channels and bookstores everywhere, and as paperback at Amazon.com (free for Kindle members).
About the Author:
Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz was trained in psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in White Plains, New York. He teaches as a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College, and is a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and fellow of the prestigious American College of Psychiatrists. He is the medical director of Rye Hospital Center, board member for six years of the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, and the first representative from the APA to the Practicing Physicians Advisory Council of the managed-care insurance industry's National Committee for Quality Assurance. His work has been featured in newspapers, magazines and medical journals, as well as in the Wayne Law Review.
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