a. I was surprised to learn that three quarters of heads of families agreed that there was a health crisis in the 70's. It seems an odd time to have a crisis, but after reading about increased costs and population growth in the rest of the chapter, it seems less surprising.
b. I agree with the sudden shift to curb the expansion of medicine's "apparently insatiable appetite for resources." The fact that a "happy sufficiency" was never reached is due to many things, not the least of which include medicine's rapid expansion, population growth, urbanization, economic growth and inflation, and transportation.
c. I disagree that the dynamics of the health care system are easy to follow. I agree with the author that people want to receive the best care possible, and that providers want to make as much money as possible, but the relationship is more complex and involve many more dynamics, such as personal lifestyle, environmental factors, socioeconomic factors, and ethical and legal decisions. I disagree with Feldstein's statement that increases in the "components" of costs related to health care were the result of and not the cause of higher prices. I don't think this makes sense, in that the market drives costs, in terms of supply and demand. The costs were more likely to be in relation to higher demand than to higher expectations, in my opnion.
d. One aspect of the book that I have witnessed is the overexpansion in some services, and the inadequate availability of others. Some fields of practice, such as specialized surgery, have an abundance of physicians, while others, such as primary care physicians in rural areas, have very little supply.
e. Something I will be aware of moving forward is the affect that public medical programs and services, such as Medicare and Medicaid, have on local and state governments. The author mentions how public funding hurt public medical services, by draining money from their budgets.
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