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Rating: 
Summary: The New Leeches
Review: During the "dark ages" leeches were used as a means of relieving the patient of what little blood remained after an injury or illness. We are now so much more advanced than that--today we use HMO's to bleed the patient of adequate care.What better system than one in which those bearing the cost--the poor insurance company--can control costs at the source and prevent fraud or adequate care by simply dictating to doctors and care providers what level of service they can provide and to reject those they consider costly or unnecessary. What better system can be conceived excpet one in which the best patient is the one which is never sick or uses the system. "Bleeding the Patient" provides th reader with in-depth information from doctors who have the best interests of their patients, not HMOs or their insurance bean counters at heart. The authors skillfully combine the use of charts with narrative to provide the reader with a 360-degree view of the medical profession and how it has been perverted for the benefit of the insurance company and not the patient. The authors explore the Canadian single-payer system and how it compares to the American system of monetary expolitation and lack of patient care. My only criticism of this well-researched and important work is that it is short on narrative and too long on charts and statistics.
Rating:
Summary: The New Leeches
Review: During the "dark ages" leeches were used as a means of relieving the patient of what little blood remained after an injury or illness. We are now so much more advanced than that--today we use HMO's to bleed the patient of adequate care. What better system than one in which those bearing the cost--the poor insurance company--can control costs at the source and prevent fraud or adequate care by simply dictating to doctors and care providers what level of service they can provide and to reject those they consider costly or unnecessary. What better system can be conceived excpet one in which the best patient is the one which is never sick or uses the system. "Bleeding the Patient" provides th reader with in-depth information from doctors who have the best interests of their patients, not HMOs or their insurance bean counters at heart. The authors skillfully combine the use of charts with narrative to provide the reader with a 360-degree view of the medical profession and how it has been perverted for the benefit of the insurance company and not the patient. The authors explore the Canadian single-payer system and how it compares to the American system of monetary expolitation and lack of patient care. My only criticism of this well-researched and important work is that it is short on narrative and too long on charts and statistics.
Rating: 
Summary: diseased system
Review: The system we rely on to protect our health is seriously diseased. The structure of ownership and management creates perverse incentives that hurt patients and demoralize doctors and nurses who struggle to provide high quality care.
We need to change this system. To do that, we need to inform as many people as possible about its failures and develop alternatives to corporate "for profit" managed care. Bleeding the Patient can help us do that. It is clear, concise, full of facts and figures. It's more of a user-friendly reference book than a narrative, but that's OK. The choice of topics and level of information is excellent. It ranges from issues of prenatal care to so-called "capitation" agreements to details regarding the hugely inefficient medical insurance bureaucracy. My only complaint is that it's sometimes difficult to figure out the references, which are abbreviated. Everyone who cares about the well being of our society--as well as their personal health--should buy several copies of this book, and hand one personally to every doctor, nurse and health practictioner that they meet. Don't leave it in the waiting room! Corporate health care managers do their best to keep this kind of information out of their "clients'" hands.
Rating:
Summary: Meticulous, measured, mandatory reading
Review: This book is a must-read, particularly for those who are concerned with the rising cost of public health care in the U.S. We pay more and get less for our expenditures than any other industrialized nation. Our emergency rooms are overloaded, our citizenry is more vulnerable to bioterror, and our national purse is being emptied by insurance conglomerates -it's time we did something about this. geocities.com/singlepayerweb
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