Ensuring America's Health

In Ensuring America's Health Christy Ford Chapin explores how what she terms “the insurance company model” came to fundamentally shape health care financing and delivery in the United States (p. 2). Specifically, she traces how zealous defense of physician autonomy in the early twentieth century, led by the American Medical Association (AMA), supported a particular model of health insurance based on limited coverage and on reimbursement of individual practitioners for specific services or procedures. This model, with continued backing from the AMA, became more entrenched and more widespread in the face of federal attempts to reform health care financing, and as the insurance company model grew so did the cost of care, quickly surpassing increases in the costs of other goods and services. Eventually, the model became so common that public programs such as Medicare, established in 1965, assumed the insurance company model. “Thus,” Chapin argues, “over the course of approximately three decades, insurers developed from system outsiders into the primary financiers of voluntary health care as well as the overseers of both private and public medical services” (p. 3). The insurance company model that emerged accounts for the distinctive features of American health care: high costs, distributed care, and corporatization

Autonomy · Business · Corporatization · Economic growth · Economics · Health care · Health care reform · Managed care · Political science · Public health · Reimbursement · Finance · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare · Public Administration · Health Policy

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