• Introduction
• US health care today: setting the record straight
• Reform #1: expand affordable private insurance
• Reform #2: establish and liberalize universal health savings accounts
• Reform #3: instill appropriate incentives with rational tax treatment of health spending
• Reform #4: modernize Medicare for the twenty-first century
• Reform #5: overhaul Medicaid and eliminate the two-tiered system for poor Americans
• Reform #6: strategically enhance the supply of medical care while ensuring innovation
• Conclusion
• Key questions and answers on the Atlas plan.

• Translator's notes
• Introduction
• Part I: M.I. Levi's interesting stories
• Part II: The anti-plague system in Russia and Western media
• Part III: Biographies of P.N. Burgasov and I.V. Domaradsky
• Part IV: Concluding remarks by the editors
• Appendixes.

Throughout the twentieth century, the 2nd Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Health (MOH) directed a wide-ranging 'anti-plague system' with the main objective of protecting the country from endemic and imported dread diseases such as plague, anthrax, tularemia, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, and others with either a natural or laboratory-based etiology. In addition, it had an important, three phased role in the Soviet Union's offensive biological warfare (BW) program: to provide training to the BW program's scientific workers on biosafety practices; to submit cultures of especially virulent pathogens to that program's research and development institutions; and, in some instances, weaponize some bacterial species.

• Chap.
• 1: The challenge: obtaining high-quality affordable health care. The good : innovation
• The bad : high costs and and a large uninsured population
• The ugly : backlash against markets and the misguided response
• Chap.
• 2. Five policy reforms to make markets work. Increase individual involvement in health care decisions
• Deregulate insurance markets and redesign medicare and medicaid
• Expand provision of health insurance
• Control anticompetitive behavior
• Reform the malpractice system
• Study the tax preference for nonprofits
• Chap.
• 3. Impacts of proposals on health care spending, the uninsured, the federal budget, and the distribution of tax burdens. Effects of reforms on health care spending
• Effects of reforms on the number of uninsured
• Effects of reforms on the federal budget
• Conclusion
• App. A. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on health care spending
• App. B. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on uninsurance
• App. C. Derivation of the elasticity of total health care spending with respect to the after-tax price of out-of-pocket spending
• App. D. Estimating the impact of policy reforms on the federal budget.

In this second edition of their 2005 work, the authors offer market-based alternatives to recent health care reforms that center on tax changes, insurance market changes, and the redesign of Medicare and Medicaid. They show that, by promoting cost- conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817910648 20160605

• The WHO ranking of health systems redux : a critical appraisal
• Ranking health systems : the limited value of life expectancy and infant mortality comparisons
• Measuring medical care quality in the United States
• Access to America's medical care
• Maintaining excellence while reducing costs : an American solution to the American health care system.

In Excellent Health offers an alternative view of the much maligned state of health care in America, using facts and peer-reviewed data to challenge the statistics often cited as evidence that medical care in the United States is substandard and poor in value relative to that of other countries. The author proposes a complete plan for reform in three critical areas of the health care puzzle--tax structure, private insurance markets, and government health insurance programs--designed to maintain choice and access to excellence and facilitate competition.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817914448 20160606

• How did we get into this mess, and why will it get worse?
• When is less insurance better than more?
• How does good technology go bad?
• A tale of two cities (and more)
• Why is the employer-paid foundation of health insurance riddled with termites?
• Do dollars distort doctor's decisions?
• Why are we all killing ourselves?
• Why is our K-12 educational system a public health menace?
• Where does the Congress miss opportunities and hit potholes?.

Charles E. Phelps provides a comprehensive look at our health care system, including how the current system evolved, how the health care sector behaves, and a detailed analysis of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" parts of the system--from technological advances (the "good") to variations in treatment patterns (the "bad") to hidden costs and perverse incentives (the "ugly"). He shows that much of the cost of health care ultimately derives from our own lifestyle choices and thus that education may well be the most powerful form of health reform we can envision.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817910549 20160604

Health policy experts from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe discuss both what to expect from the recent health reform legislation and alternatives that should still be considered. The contributors argue that Americans already have a superior health care system and that if Congress enacts reforms that remove artificial barriers and constructively open markets to competition, private-sector creativity will generate innovative, low-cost insurance products for tens of millions of consumers.
(source: Nielsen Book Data) 9780817912741 20160604

• The period prior to
• 1959
• 1960-1982: revolution and transition
• 1983-1989: a period of systems maturation and adjustment
• 1990-1994: the darkest days of the "special period" in Cuba
• The situation in Cuba: today and in a post-Castro Cuba.