User's guides accompany our purchases of cameras, appliances, autos, and other technical items. Reading the guides unlocks the potential of these unfamiliar purchases so that we may become proficient in their use. The New Medical Marketplace is a physician's guide to the current medical marketplace.
Like any good user's guide, this book starts with historical background, then presents the theory of medical costs, and finally offers guidance to those who work in the medical marketplace. Immediately following the title page is a bar graph of medical costs expressed in terms of percentage of the gross national product (GNP) and average cost per hospital day. All the bars increase dramatically over the last two decades. This graph presents as clear a picture of the new medical marketplace as an exploded view of a product contained within a commercial user's guide.
In the historical review the authors discuss how social changes have