The Health Care Revolution: From Medical Monopoly to Market Competition

272 pages
Cloth $63.00
Ebook $60.00

America’s market-based health care system, unique among the nations of the world, is in large part the product of an obscure, yet profound, revolution that overthrew the medical monopoly in the late 1970s. In this lucid, balanced account, Carl F. Ameringer tells how this revolution came into being when the U.S. Supreme Court and Congress prompted the antitrust agencies of the federal government—the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department—to change the rules of the health care system. Ameringer lays out the key events that led up to this regime change; explores its broader social, political, and economic contexts; examines the views of both its proponents and opponents; and considers its current trajectory.

Reviews

“In The Health Care Revolution, Carl Ameringer elucidates as no one else has done the central importance of antitrust regulation as health care policy in the United States since the 1970s, with an inside view into the activities of the Federal Trade Commission. An exciting, lucid, and ambitious book.”—Rosemary A. Stevens, author of The Public-Private Health Care State

“Carl Ameringer’s penetrating scholarly vision permits him to see inside the medical and legal professions. The result is an authoritative monograph that will claim the attention of scholars and policymakers because it frames the modern history of medical care in new and important ways.”—Edward D. Berkowitz, author of Something Happened: A Political and Cultural History of the Seventies