TY - CHAP M1 - Book, Section TI - Preface A1 - Bodenheimer, Thomas A1 - Grumbach, Kevin PY - 2020 T2 - Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach, 8e AB - Understanding Health Policy: A Clinical Approach is a book about health policy as well as individual patients and caregivers and how they interact with each other and with the overall health system. We, the authors, are practicing primary care physicians—one in a public hospital and clinic and the other, for many years, in a private practice. We are also analysts of our nation’s health care system. In one sense, these two sides of our lives seem quite separate. When treating a patient’s illness, health expenditures as a percentage of gross domestic product or variations in surgical rates between one city and another seem remote if not irrelevant—but they are neither remote nor irrelevant. Health policy affects the patients we see on a daily basis. Managed care referral patterns determine to which specialist we can send a patient; the coverage gaps for outpatient medications in the Medicare benefit package affects how we prescribe medications for our elderly patients; and differences in access to care between families on Medicaid and those with private coverage influences which patients end up seeing one of us in the private sector over the other in a public hospital. In Understanding Health Policy, we hope to bridge the gap separating the microworld of individual patient visits and the macrouniverse of health policy. SN - PB - McGraw Hill CY - New York, NY Y2 - 2024/03/28 UR - accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1171158004 ER -