The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic Revised Edition or Money Driven Medicine

The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic, Revised Edition

Author: Richard A Epstein

Richard Espstein's classic book on gambling and its mathematical analysis covers the full range of games from penny matching, to blackjack and other casino games, to the stock market (including Black-Scholes analysis). Epstein is witty and insightful, a pleasure to dip into and read and rewarding to study.

Booknews

Reprint of teh revised edition (1977) in paper binding. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Read also Federal Income Taxation 2005 or Crisp

Money-Driven Medicine: The Real Reason Health Care Costs So Much

Author: Maggie Mahar

Why is medical care in the United States so expensive? For decades, Americans have taken it as a matter of faith that we spend more because we have the best health care system in the world. But as costs levitate, that argument becomes more difficult to make. Today, we spend twice as much as Japan on health care—yet few would argue that our health care system is twice as good.

Instead, startling new evidence suggests that one out of every three of our health care dollars is squandered on unnecessary or redundant tests; unproven, sometimes unwanted procedures; and overpriced drugs and devices that, too often, are no better than the less expensive products they have replaced.

How did this happen? In Money-Driven Medicine, Maggie Mahar takes the reader behind the scenes of a $2 trillion industry to witness how billions of dollars are wasted in a Hobbesian marketplace that pits the industry's players against each other. In remarkably candid interviews, doctors, hospital administrators, patients, health care economists, corporate executives, and Wall Street analysts describe a war of "all against all" that can turn physicians, hospitals, insurers, drugmakers, and device makers into blood rivals. Rather than collaborating, doctors and hospitals compete. Rather than sharing knowledge, drugmakers and device makers divide value. Rather than thinking about long-term collective goals, the imperatives of an impatient marketplace force health care providers to focus on short-term fiscal imperatives. And so investments in untested bleeding-edge medical technologies crowd out investments in information technology that might, in the long run, not only reduce errorsbut contain costs.

In theory, free market competition should tame health care inflation. In fact, Mahar demonstrates, when it comes to medicine, the traditional laws of supply and demand do not apply. Normally, when supply expands, prices fall. But in the health care industry, as the number and variety of drugs, devices, and treatments multiplies, demand rises to absorb the excess, and prices climb. Meanwhile, the perverse incentives of a fee-for-service system reward health care providers for doing more, not less.

In this superbly written book, Mahar shows why doctors must take responsibility for the future of our health care industry. Today, she observes, "physicians have been stripped of their standing as professionals: Insurers address them as vendors ('Dear Health Care Provider'), drugmakers and device makers see them as customers (someone you might take to lunch or a strip club), while . . . consumers (aka patients) are encouraged to see their doctors as overpaid retailers. . . . Before patients can reclaim their rightful place as the center—and indeed as the raison d'être—of our health care system," Mahar suggests, "we must once again empower doctors . . . to practice patient-centered medicine—based not on corporate imperatives, doctors' druthers, or even patients' demands," but on the best scientific research available.

Publishers Weekly

Mahar, a financial journalist whose previous book (Bull!) tracked the history of the stock market from 1982 to 1999, here applies her keen analytic talents and economic savvy to America's complicated and increasingly dysfunctional health-care system. Mahar's diagnosis: our privately managed yet mainly publicly funded system produces the worst of both worlds-high costs, rampant inefficiencies and intense competition among providers that doesn't benefit patients. She traces how today's market-driven medical system emerged over the past century thanks to trends that gradually stripped power from doctors and gave it to corporations, turning patients into profit centers. No one is spared in Mahar's thoroughly researched and carefully reasoned study: she criticizes frustrated (and increasingly money-minded) physicians, self-serving insurance companies, for-profit hospital chains and pharmaceutical companies driven by inflated Wall Street expectations. Mahar uncovers isolated pockets of good news, including the VA hospital system, which provides excellent care at modest cost thanks largely to its exemption from the pressures of competition. But her goal is not to offer any programmatic solution. Instead, she wants to show why the most common economic assumptions about health care-especially those that extol the magic power of free markets-are false and stand in the way of real reform. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Mahar (Bull!: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982-2004) challenges the idea that American healthcare is simply a commodity whose problems free markets will solve. What we have instead, she writes, is capitalism turned on its head. As new devices, drugs, and treatments emerge, their supply creates and drives demand. Beginning by tracing how "what was once a profession evolved into a $2 trillion industry," she points out the conflicts created when doctors, hospitals, drug and device makers, insurers, and stockholders all have to balance caring and quality against profit. By contrast, she says, the Veterans Health Administration has become a model for how a system can work when efficiency and quality-and not revenue production-are the driving forces. Mahar's research and interviews are extensive, up-to-date, and well documented, and her writing style is lively and engaging. While she reaches some of the same conclusions as David M. Cutler in Your Money or Your Life: Strong Medicine for America's Health Care System, her book is more wide-ranging and accessible. Recommended for public, academic, and hospital libraries.-Dick Maxwell, Porter Adventist Hosp. Lib., Denver Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.