Taming the Beloved Beast
eBook - ePub

Taming the Beloved Beast

How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System

  1. 280 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Taming the Beloved Beast

How Medical Technology Costs Are Destroying Our Health Care System

About this book

Why health care reform must tackle the escalating cost of medical technology

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.

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Yes, you can access Taming the Beloved Beast by Daniel Callahan in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Politics & International Relations & Ethics in Medicine. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Introduction
  8. Chapter 1: Medicare on the Ropes
  9. Chapter 2: Taming the Beloved Beast: Medical Technology
  10. Chapter 3: Getting Serious about Costs and Technology
  11. Chapter 4: Competition: The Fix That Will Fail
  12. Chapter 5: The Cohabitation of Medicine and Commerce
  13. Chapter 6: “Medical Necessity”: An All-But-Useless Concept
  14. Chapter 7: Redefining “Medical Necessity”: From Individual Good to Common Good
  15. Chapter 8: Getting Out from Under: The Politics of Pain
  16. Coda
  17. Notes
  18. Index