a Portfolio of Tactics to Simplify Health Care

What drives change in health care systems? Why do certain changes occur in some nations and not in others? Author Carolyn Hughes Tuohy argues that the answer lies in understanding the "accidents" of history that have shaped national systems at critical moments, and in the distinctive "logics" of these systems.

Over the last thirty years, scholars of health care organizations have been searching for concepts and images to illuminate their underlying, and shifting, modes of organizing. Nowhere has this controversy been more intense than in the United Kingdom, given the long succession of top down reorganizations within the National Health Service (NHS) over the last thirty years.

What now? Despite the rancorous, divisive, year-long debate in Washington, many Americans still don’t understand what the historic overhaul of the health care system will—or won’t—mean. In Landmark, the national reporting staff of The Washington Post pierces through the confusion, examining the new law’s likely impact on us all: our families, doctors, hospitals, health care providers, insurers, and other parts of a health care system that has grown to occupy one-sixth of the U.S. economy.