Faculty Bibliography

In rich nations, diarrhea is a vaguely amusing, embarrassing disorder associated with eating and drinking too much. But, as David Werner makes clear in a short but important article in the April issue of the journal Pediatrics, in poor countries diarrhea is no joke

Perhaps the most important tool we can borrow from our neighbors is the use of fixed overall budgets. Fixed budgets do have a price. They are likely to restrict access to specialists and expensive technology. But the tradeoff in terms of greater access to primary care and preventative services, which each of these countries displays, seems worth it. For until these countries decided to place caps on their health-care budgets, they were burdened, as we continue to be, with spiraling inflation in prices and cost. The rest of the industrialized world knows that cost containment requires governments to set fixed caps on how much money can be spent on health care each year

Perhaps the most important tool we can borrow from our neighbors is the use of fixed overall budgets. Fixed budgets do have a price. They are likely to restrict access to specialists and expensive technology. But the trade-off in terms of greater access to primary care and preventive services, which each of these countries displays, seems worth it. For until these countries decided to place caps on their health care budgets, they were burdened, as we continue to be, with spiraling inflation in prices and cost. The rest of the industrialized world knows that cost containment requires governments to set fixed caps on how much money can be spent on health care each year

No other country spends anything like the amount of money we do on health care. And yet no other industrialized country has as ragged a safety net as we get for our money. When $940 billion cannot buy poor kids in Philadelphia basic dental care because the state has eliminated their benefits to get a handle on costs, when HIV prevention programs are closing amid an epidemic in New York, California and other states because the public hospitals and city agencies have run out of funds, when rural farmers in Minnesota delay taking their sick kids to the doctor because they cannot afford the price, something must be done

Perhaps the most important tool we can borrow from our neighbors is the use of fixed overall budgets. Fixed budgets do have a price. They are likely to restrict access to specialists and expensive technology. But the trade-off in terms of greater access to primary care and preventive services, which each of these countries displays, seems worth it. For until these countries decided to place caps on their health-care budgets, they were burdened, as we continue to be, with spiraling inflation in prices and cost. The rest of the industrialized world knows that cost containment requires governments to set fixed caps on how much money can be spent on health care each year

Perhaps the most important tool we can borrow from our neighbors is the use of fixed overall budgets. Fixed budgets do have a price. They are likely to restrict access to specialists and expensive technology. But the tradeoff in terms of greater access to primary care and preventative services, which each of these countries displays, seems worth it. For until these countries decided to place caps on their health-care budgets, they were burdened, as we continue to be, with spiraling inflation in prices and cost. The rest of the industrialized world knows that cost containment requires governments to set fixed caps on how much money can be spent on health care each year

The Health-Care Financing Administration, the folks in the U.S. federal medicare program, just issued a report stating that our collective bill for health care will hit $1.7 trillion US by the year 2000