Charles E. Phelps provides a comprehensive look at our health care system, including how the current system evolved, how the health care sector behaves, and a detailed analysis of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" parts of the system—from technological advances (the "good") to variations in treatment patterns (the "bad") to hidden costs and perverse incentives (the "ugly"). He shows that much of the cost of health care ultimately derives from our own lifestyle choices and thus that education may well be the most powerful form of health reform we can envision.

Mark V. Pauly offers a detailed look at the individual insurance market in the United States. He explains how it works, suggests approaches to improvement that build on what currently works well, and provides a realistic assessment of how much improvement we can demand and expect. He concludes that, although there are some serious deficiencies in today's individual insurance market, there are also some important advantages in this market that should be preserved.

In this second edition of their 2005 work, the authors offer market-based alternatives to recent health care reforms that center on tax changes, insurance market changes, and the redesign of Medicare and Medicaid. They show that, by promoting cost- conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending.

In Excellent Health offers an alternative view of the much maligned state of health care in America, using facts and peer-reviewed data to challenge the statistics often cited as evidence that medical care in the United States is substandard and poor in value relative to that of other countries. The author proposes a complete plan for reform in three critical areas of the health care puzzle—tax structure, private insurance markets, and government health insurance programs—designed to maintain choice and access to excellence and facilitate competition.

Many papers included in this volume express skepticism regarding both the diagnosis of the American health system as fundamentally ailing and the prescription of greater public intervention in the financing and delivery of medical services as the remedy and sure path to recovery.

The debate rages on over how to cope with the rising costs of medical care—proposed solutions range from a single payer system with a broad government control to loosely defined market-driven plans. The authors look at three key elements of health care costs and offer thoughtful, realistic suggestions to help stem the tide of rising expenses for everyone.

Health policy experts from the United States, Canada, and Western Europe discuss both what to expect from the recent health reform legislation and alternatives that should still be considered. The contributors argue that Americans already have a superior health care system and that if Congress enacts reforms that remove artificial barriers and constructively open markets to competition, private-sector creativity will generate innovative, low-cost insurance products for tens of millions of consumers.

Dr. Scott Atlas presents key reforms to meet the significant health care challenges facing the nation after examining the status of US health care, particularly in light of the Affordable Care Act. Atlas proposes a six-point, strategic, incentive-based reform plan for health care to instill market-based competition, empower consumers, and reduce the federal government’s authority over health care. Those reforms focus on restoring the appropriate incentives to increase the quality of health care and reduce its costs.

A government monopoly over drug regulation is not sacrosanct. This hard-hitting book describes the current regulation of drugs by the FDA and proposes a model for fundamental, yet workable, reform—including an innovative proposal for drug testing and certification review.

The authors explode many of the myths surrounding recent California health care reform plans, revealing that the study upon which many of the reform premises are based contains several errors that inflate its estimate of the "hidden tax" on the insured, overstate the amount of care received by uninsured persons, and understate the revenues currently available to fund that care. They offer a new calculation for arriving at a reasonable upper bound on the hidden tax, along with suggestions for future research in calculating correctly the magnitude of the hidden tax in California.