Christy Ford Chapin, Ensuring Americas Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge UP, 2015)
Christy Ford Chapin, an associate professor of history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, has written a history of the funding of America\u2019s health care system: Ensuring America\u2019s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (Cambridge University Press, 2015).\xa0\xa0She begins with an account of the development of physicians\u2019 practices in the mid-nineteenth century and traces the evolution of the American Medical Association\u2019s role in shaping how physicians practiced medicine and how it was financed.\xa0\xa0The advent of the insurance model for funding health care was a creation of the Progressive period and became dominant in the late 1930s, during the New Deal.\xa0\xa0Chapin provides an account of the pitfalls of the insurance funding mechanism and recounts the battles between vested, competing interests, such as the AMA, independent physicians, corporate employers, labor unions, insurance companies (nonprofit and commercial), and the state and federal governments.\xa0\xa0Each of these entities shaped the health care system we have today.\xa0\xa0Chapin\u2019s book helps explain how we got here and her critique of the insurance model suggests possible alternatives to our contemporary system of paying for health care.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/law