Health Policy- Brasfield Ch. 1 and 2

To begin with, Brasfield looks at health care from an economic standpoint, which is what past authors have done as well but the book "Health Policy The Decade Ahead" examines health care and economics more in depth. For example in chapter one Brasfield says that the basic measures of health care spending includes percentage of gross domestic product spent on health care, the annual rate of increase in health care spending, total of health care spending raised by taxation, the share of health care dollars spent for hospital services, and private insurance premiums. The list above, according to Brasfield, is the basic economics in health policy. Also I noticed throughout the first two chapters that there are a lot of graphs to show how economics and cost ebbs and flows when concerning health policy. Also throughout chapter one the author goes through the decades. For example he talks about the civil war era and then on through the 1900's. Throughout chapter two, Brasfield discusses and looks at the institutions and processes of government, and mostly focusing on Congress. At the beginning of chapter two the author goes through the fundamentals of introducing a bill and plays out hat that looks like in government. Then chapter two goes into details about what pressures push decision making in certain ways such as interest groups, lobbyist, or the bureaucratic system. So far I have enjoyed this book and hope to continue to!