Improving the Medicare Market: Adding Choice and Protections
Author: Marion Ein Lewin
Improving the Medicare Market examines how to give Medicare beneficiaries the same choice of health plan options enjoyed in the private sector - yet protect them as consumers and patients. This book recommends approaches to ensuring accountability and informed purchasing for Medicare beneficiaries in an environment of broader choice and managed care. It examines how the government should evaluate and approve plans, what role the traditional Medicare program should play, how to help the elderly understand and fairly compare their options, and how to develop the necessary guidelines regarding enrollment, marketing, and grievance procedures.
Bryan E. Dowd
The book, presented in two parts, first reports the proceedings and findings of the Committee on Choice and Managed Care of the Institute of Medicine. The second, appendix section contains eight reports on related topics commissioned by the committee. The implied purpose of the book is to report on the proceedings and findings of the ten-member Committee's 12-month project to study ways to ensure public accountability and informed purchasing for Medicare beneficiaries. The targeted audience appears to be primarily health policymakers, and secondarily, health plan administrators. Consumer information about providers and health plans has been an important, neglected and to some extent, intractable, topic in healthcare markets for many years. Increased enrollment in managed care has given the topic a recent boost in policymaking circles. The Committee and the participants in their symposium certainly are recognized experts in the field of consumer information and Medicare managed care. The book is appropriately illustrated. The references are current and pertinent. The commissioned articles might serve better as chapters than as appendixes. This is an interesting and informative book. The articles in the appendixes are well written and on the point. In fact, the articles are better than the first three chapters that include Overview, Symposium Summary, and Findings and Recommendations. Important points are omitted in those initial chapters: (1) Before HMOs, the idea that anyone or any organization was accountable for the health status of a group of people never received serious consideration; (2) Better information has costs as well as benefits, and the goal should be to balancemarginal costs and marginal benefits; (3) We know more about quality of care in HMOs versus the FFS sector for the Medicare population than any other population. The principal information challenge associated with Medicare HMOs is disseminating the established finding that HMOs generally, and certainly for serious illnesses (e.g., cancer, stroke, AMI), provide better care at lower prices than the FFS sector. Nonetheless, the book provides perspectives from influential policymakers.
Doody Review Services
Reviewer: Bryan E. Dowd, PhD (University of Minnesota School of Public Health)
Description: The book, presented in two parts, first reports the proceedings and findings of the Committee on Choice and Managed Care of the Institute of Medicine. The second, appendix section contains eight reports on related topics commissioned by the committee.
Purpose: The implied purpose of the book is to report on the proceedings and findings of the ten-member Committee's 12-month project to study ways to ensure public accountability and informed purchasing for Medicare beneficiaries.
Audience: The targeted audience appears to be primarily health policymakers, and secondarily, health plan administrators.
Features: Consumer information about providers and health plans has been an important, neglected and to some extent, intractable, topic in healthcare markets for many years. Increased enrollment in managed care has given the topic a recent boost in policymaking circles. The Committee and the participants in their symposium certainly are recognized experts in the field of consumer information and Medicare managed care. The book is appropriately illustrated. The references are current and pertinent. The commissioned articles might serve better as chapters than as appendixes.
Assessment: This is an interesting and informative book. The articles in the appendixes are well written and on the point. In fact, the articles are better than the first three chapters that include Overview, Symposium Summary, and Findings and Recommendations. Important points are omitted in those initial chapters: (1) Before HMOs, the idea that anyone or any organization was accountable for the health status of a group of people never received serious consideration; (2) Better information has costs as well as benefits, and the goal should be to balance marginal costs and marginal benefits; (3) We know more about quality of care in HMOs versus the FFS sector for the Medicare population than any other population. The principal information challenge associated with Medicare HMOs is disseminating the established finding that HMOs generally, and certainly for serious illnesses (e.g., cancer, stroke, AMI), provide better care at lower prices than the FFS sector. Nonetheless, the book provides perspectives from influential policymakers.
Booknews
Examines how to give Medicare beneficiaries the same choice of health plan options enjoyed in the private sector while protecting them as consumers and patients. Makes recommendations concerning how government should evaluate and approve plans, what role the traditional Medicare programs should play, how to help the elderly understand and compare their options, and how to develop guidelines for enrollment, marketing, and grievance procedures. Based on material from a February 1996 symposium. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Rating
4 Stars! from Doody
See also: The Art of Tea and Friendship or Vineyard Kitchen
The Ashio Riot of 1907: A Social History of Mining in Japan
Author: Nimura Kazuo
In The Ashio Riot of 1907, Nimura Kazuo explains why the workers at the Ashio copper mine - Japan's largest mining concern and one of the largest such operations in the world - joined together for three days of rioting against the Furukawa Company in February 1907. Exploring an event in labor history unprecedented in the Japan of that time, Nimura uses this riot as a launching point to analyze the social, economic, and political structure of early industrial Japan. As such, The Ashio Riot of 1907 functions as a powerful critique of Japanese scholarly approaches to labor economics and social history.
Choice
The introduction, prologue, conclusions, and epilogue together offer a valuable overview of the Ashio incident and its place in both the narrower context of Japanese labor history and the broader framework of labor studies worldwide, and these components are general enough to be of value even to undergraduates. . . . [A] valuable contribution to labor studies.
Jour of Intl Law and Com
Using an impressive array of primary sources, maps, prints, and photographs, [Nimura] superbly recreates the scene of the riot, which he himself visited. . . . [His] work is also intriguing because he uses this case study of the Ashio riot to test paradigms and methodologies that long held sway in Japanese studies of labor history. . . . [He] offers fresh perspectives, including international comparisons. . .
Journal of Asian History
The translators are to be congratulated for rendering Nimura's vivid description and lucid analysis into highly readable English. . . . [P]ersuasive. . . . This is a fine work of social history.
American Historical Review
Nimura Kazuo's book is an impressive example of the historian's craft: rich empirically, inventive methodologically, engaged and provocative interpretively. . . . By any measure, this book stands as a major work of labor history, a model of painstaking research and keen historical analysis that deserves a wide audience.
Monumenta Nipponica
[T]his social history of mining is simultaneously an intellectual history of disputes among Japanese labor historians. . . . [The Ashio Riot of 1907] makes a major contribution to our understanding of Japanese labor history. Thanks to this translation, Anglophone readers can understand not only how Japanese companies and their workers produced ore, but also how Japanese historians have produced social history.
Table of Contents:
| List of Figures and Tables | ||
| Editor's Preface | ||
| Acknowledgments | ||
| Author's Introduction to the English Edition | 1 | |
| Prologue: The Ashio Copper Mine and the Japanese Mining Industry | 12 | |
| Ch. 1 | The Subjective Conditions of the Ashio Riot: A Critique of the Theory of "Atomized Laborers" | 41 |
| Ch. 2 | A Historical Analysis of the Lodge System: A Critique of the Migrant Labor Theory | 154 |
| Conclusions: The Significance of Ashio | 186 | |
| Epilogue: Japanese Miners in Comparative Perspective | 217 | |
| Notes | 233 | |
| Index | 267 |
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