Health Against Wealth: HMOs and the Breakdown of Medical Trust

By: George Anders

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Synopsis: The HMO system is often praised for cutting runaway costs. It is supposed to act as a powerful market force to stop greedy doctors and hospitals from treating patients like pi-atas, to be cut open for profit. Health Against Wealth reveals that when you are confronting cancer, heart disease, or psychiatric illness, when you face a medical emergency or your child requires complex pediatric surgery, all those cost-saving rules and artful ways of keeping doctors frugal can turn against you. Wall Street Journal reporter George Anders explains why " managed care " is so appealing to employers and insurers and how HMO bureaucrats can thwart necessary, even life-saving treatment under the guise of cost efficiency. Health Against Wealth takes an unflinching look at the profit-hungry entrepreneurs who have poured into this new" health industry" and provides alarming examples of political manipulation by increasingly powerful HMO lobbyists.