Best Care Anywhere
Event
Health Care Delivery Reform: As tens of million of Americans gain access to an already broken health care system, what can we learn from the transformation of nation's veterans hospitals?
Since its original publication three years ago, Phillip Longman's Best Care Anywhere has become a classic among health care delivery system reformers. Nobel Laureate and New York Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has applauded its central insight: that a universal, integrated system such as the VA is best equipped to maximize health care quality while lower costs thanks to its long-term relationship with its patients. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post has called Best Care Anywhere, "Among the most important social policy books published in the last decade." Through word of mouth and expert endorsement, it has become one of the nation's best selling books on fixing the health care delivery system as well as assigned reading for students of health care policy. Now, by popular demand, Longman has produced a new, expanded second edition that relates the book's paradoxical message to the new and urgent challenges created by passage of comprehensive health insurance reform.
The book chronicles the transformation of the VA health system from one of the worst health care providers in United States into one that outperforms nearly all others on metrics ranging from patient safety to the use of electronic medical records, adoption of evidence medicine, cost-effectiveness and patient satisfaction. Longman uses this story, along with that of his first wife's death to breast cancer at a prestigious cancer treatment center, to draw out lessons about how much of what we think we know about the working of the health care delivery system is simply wrong.
Please join us for a conversation between Longman and Washington Monthly editor in chief Paul Glastris, who edited and published the original magazine cover story that became the book, and who continues to prod Longman for fuller explanations of how it can possible be true. Glastris is also a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation. Longman is a Schwartz Senior fellow at the Washington Monthlyand a Program Fellow at New America.
Participants
featured speaker
Phillip Longman
Senior Research Fellow, Economic Growth Program
New America Foundation
Author, Best Care Anywhere
moderator
Paul Glastris
Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation
Editor-in-Chief, Washington Monthly