The Corporate Transformation of Health Care: Can the Public Interest Still Be Served?

The author explores how the corporate transformation of hospitals, HMOs, and the insurance and pharmaceutical industries has resulted in reduction in services, dangerous cost cutting, poor regulation, and corrupt research. He sheds light on the political lobbying and media manipulation that keeps the present system in place. Exposing the shortcomings of reform proposals that do little to alter the status quo, he makes a case for a workable single-payer system. This is an essential read for today's practitioners, policy makers, healthcare analysts and providers, and all those concerned with the precarious state of America's under- and uninsured.

Geyman (emeritus, family medicine, U. of Washington) spent 13 years in rural practice before turning to academia. Over 30 years he watched control of the US health-care system shift from medical professionals and not-for-profit interests to a relatively small number of large health-care corporations, to the detriment, he believes, of the public interest. His analysis of the extent of the corporate transformation looks at its impacts on costs and on access to health care. He also considers options for reform given current political and economic realities. The intended audience is physicians and other health professionals, policy makers, legislators, business and labor groups, and citizen reform groups as well as consumers. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

John P. Geyman, MD, is Professor Emeritus of Family Medicine at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, where he served as department chairman for 14 years. As a board-certified family physician, he has spent 13 years in rural practice and over 25 years in academic medicine.

Dr. Geyman is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He was the founding editor of The Journal of Family Practice (1973-1990), and served as Editor of The Journal of the American Board of Family Practice from 1990 to 2003. He has authored four books of his own, The Modern Family Doctor and Changing Medical Practice (1971), Family Practice: Foundation of Changing Health Care (1985), Health Care in America: Can Our Ailing System Be Healed? (2002), and Falling Through the Safety Net: Americans Confront the Perils of Health Insurance (2004). He has co-edited five other books, including Behavioral Science in Family Practice (1980), Family Practice: An International Perspective in Developed Countries (1983) (translated into Japanese, 1985), Evidence-Based Clinical Practice: Concepts and Approaches (2000), and Textbook of Rural Medicine (2001). He has also authored or co-authored more than 175 articles and editorials in professional journals concerning various clinical subjects, primary care, medical education, and health policy.