STANFORD, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Hoover Institution Press today released Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (2nd ed.) by John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard and Daniel P. Kessler, co published with the American Enterprise Institute. In this second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, the authors offer market-based reform alternatives to ObamaCare—the health care reform proposed in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in 2010.
“The costs of the US health care system are exploding. Cogan, Hubbard, and Kessler give us plenty of really useful ideas to get costs down and quality and availability up. Legislators, please read this book,” said former secretary of state George P. Shultz.
Since the book’s initial publication in 2005, Cogan, Hubbard, and Kessler have conducted additional research on the impact of government policies on health care. In this second edition, the authors propose five reforms to improve the ability of markets to create a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system that is responsive to the needs of individuals. These reforms include increasing individual involvement; reregulating insurance markets; redesigning Medicare and Medicaid; improving the provision of information to doctors and patients; and enhancing competition and reforming the malpractice system. Together, these reforms will significantly reduce health care costs and improve the system’s productivity, fairness, and responsiveness.
“The authors of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise make a strong case for further reforms in tax policy, insurance regulation, and other policies to get Americans more involved in their health care and its costs,” says Mark B. McClellan, director of the Engelberg Center for Health Care Reform and senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution. “This is a big challenge, but one that must be addressed in order to bend the curve of rising health care spending.”
“This book continues to point out the crucial importance of taxation reform in improving incentives for the bulk of the population to consider the true cost of health insurance relative to the true cost of health care,” says Mark V. Pauly, Bendheim Professor in the Department of Health Care Systems at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. “In so doing, this book illuminates the path to cost containment that can be effective in reducing spending without relying on pie-in-the-sky optimism about changing a delivery system Americans like or unacceptable regulatory constraints on their access to care and technology in that system. It outlines the way toward sensible health reform that can work in ways consistent with American values and Americans' preferences.”
John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. R. Glenn Hubbard is the Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Graduate School of Business, and a professor of economics at Columbia University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Daniel P. Kessler is a professor of economics, law, and policy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business; a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
For more information on Healthy, Wealthy and Wise: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System (2nd ed.), visit HooverPress.org. For more information on the Hoover Institution, visit Hoover.org, find us on Facebook (keyword: Hoover Institution), or visit AdvancingAFreeSociety.org.