This book assesses the fragmentation of the U.S. health care system in chapters by the nation's leading professors in law, medicine, economics, health, business, and political science. The book demonstrates the extent of fragmentation among doctors who treat individual patients, even within single hospitals, and the even worse fragmentation that exists over time and across patients. The book further shows that this fragmentation leads to increased medical error, higher costs, less preventive care, and misallocations of health care resources. It identifies possible causes of fragmentation, incl ... More

This book assesses the fragmentation of the U.S. health care system in chapters by the nation's leading professors in law, medicine, economics, health, business, and political science. The book demonstrates the extent of fragmentation among doctors who treat individual patients, even within single hospitals, and the even worse fragmentation that exists over time and across patients. The book further shows that this fragmentation leads to increased medical error, higher costs, less preventive care, and misallocations of health care resources. It identifies possible causes of fragmentation, including laws that mandate separate payments for each provider, restrict hospitals or others from controlling or rewarding the set of providers treating a patient to assure coordinated care, and provide affirmative disincentives for coordinating care by paying more for uncoordinated care that requires more services. Finally, the book examines and proposes reforms that could make our health care system less fragmented, more efficient, and more effective. The book and its proposals are particularly well-timed because the U.S. will have to consider these problems and how best to ameliorate them as the U.S. considers how best to implement its new health care statute.