Description
Book SynopsisMiriam Laugesen goes to the heart of U.S. medical pricing: to a largely unknown committee of organizations affiliated with the American Medical Association. Medicare’s ready acceptance of this committee’s advisory recommendations sets off a chain reaction across the American health care system, leading to high—and disproportionate—rate setting.
Trade ReviewIn
Fixing Medical Prices: How Physicians Are Paid, Miriam Laugesen opens the ‘black box’ of policy choices embedded in the nation’s health financing system. Her thorough analysis of physician pricing exposes how seemingly technical decisions on physician prices are actually highly political—riddled with conflicts of interest and largely immune from public accountability. Policymakers and the public owe Miriam Laugesen a debt of gratitude for shining a light on fundamental policy flaws. We now have no excuse for failing to correct them. -- Judith Feder, Georgetown University
Our medical prices are too high. Moreover, these prices are grossly misaligned with what Americans really need. Warped prices reflect the arcane political economy of our $3 trillion medical system. In this beautiful book, Miriam Laugesen combines the rigor of political science with the granular knowledge of health services research to illuminate these pathologies. Most importantly, she provides a road map to do better. This is an important book. -- Harold Pollack, University of Chicago
Combining interviews, thoughtful historical perspective, and statistical analysis, Miriam Laugesen offers the best study yet on the politics of physician payment in the United States. A weak administrative apparatus in Washington makes the power of the House of Medicine all the more formidable. The results of that process—including the power of specialty doctors and the weakness of primary care providers—should interest and trouble us all. -- Daniel Carpenter, Harvard University
Will people still care about these issues for the next four years? I hope so, because this is the best book I know of on Medicare pricing and its influence on pricing throughout the broader U.S. health care system. -- Tyler Cowen * Marginal Revolution *
In
Fixing Medical Prices, Miriam Laugesen takes a deep dive into the weeds of U.S. medical pricing policy to uncover problems with how Medicare sets physician payments. -- Kathleen M. Haddad * Health Affairs *
Fixing Medical Prices is a superb book on a subject—how Medicare determines what it pays physicians—that is both exceedingly complex and arcane, yet also critically important in terms of impacting the structure of health care finance, organization and delivery…The book should be required reading for health policy scholars, medical students, medical historians, and anyone interested in how money—in the form of Medicare payment policy—shapes U.S. health care. -- Rick Mayes * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *
