The Medical Delivery Business
Subtitle: Health Reform, Childbirth, and the Economic Order
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: December 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 252
ISBN-13: 9780813533285
Subjects: Health systems & services; History; Health Policy; Medical / Nursing; United States; Medical; USA; Health Care Delivery; Administration; Economic aspects; Health planning; Health services administration; Medical economics
Description: An account of the influence of business thinking on the practice of medicine. Americans at the end of the twentieth century worried that managed care had fundamentally transformed the character of medicine. In The Medical Delivery Business, Barbara Bridgman Perkins uses examples drawn from maternal and infant care to argue that the business approach in medicine is not a new development. Health care reformers throughout the century looked to industrial, corporate, and commercial enterprises as models for the institutions, specialties, and technological strategies that defined modern medicine. The Medical Delivery Business challenges the conventional view that a dose of the market is good for medicine. While Perkins is sympathetic to the goals of progressive and feminist reformers, she questions whether their strategies will succeed in making medicine more equitable and effective. She argues that the medical care system itself needs to be fundamentally "re-formed," and the reforms must be based on democracy, caring, and social justice as well as economics.