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Taming the Beloved Beast: How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System
Daniel Callahan
Technological innovation is deeply woven into the fabric of American culture, and is no less a basic feature of American health care. Medical technology saves lives and relieves suffering, and is enormously popular with the public, profitable for doctors, and a source of great wealth for industry. Yet its costs are rising at a dangerously unsustainable rate. The control of technology costs poses a terrible ethical and policy dilemma. How can we deny people what they may need to live and flourish? Yet is it not also harmful to let rising costs strangle our health care system, eventually harming everyone?
In Taming the Beloved Beast, esteemed medical ethicist Daniel Callahan confronts this dilemma head-on. He argues that we can't escape it by organizational changes alone. Nothing less than a fundamental transformation of our thinking about health care is needed to achieve lasting and economically sustainable reform. The technology bubble, he contends, is beginning to burst.
Callahan weighs the ethical arguments for and against limiting the use of medical technologies, and he argues that reining in health care costs requires us to change entrenched values about progress and technological innovation. Taming the Beloved Beast shows that the cost crisis is as great as that of the uninsured. Only a government-regulated universal health care system can offer the hope of managing technology and making it affordable for all.
Amazon Rating:  | |
| US$23.96 |  |
(As of Sep 05 14:34 , info) | |
1 review from Economics blogs:
- EconLog 08 Mar 10:
... If you ever want to see a real debate on health care policy, schedule an event featuring Daniel Callahan and me. Callahan is very anti-market, but he and I start from a baseline level of agreement about what the health care issue is all about. What follows are some excerpts from his book, Taming the Beloved Beast, and my own comments. p. 1 health care economists attribute about 50% of the annual increase of health care costs to new technologies or to the intensified use of old ones. What he calls technology is what in Crisis of Abundance I called 'premium medicine, ' because I want to ...
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