Selling Our Souls brings to light these institutions' diverse moral-economic contradictions, shaped by their foundational ideals and different resource bases. "This exceptionally clear and lively book takes us deep into the heart of the American health care system to observe how doctors, nurses, and administrative staffs in three hospitals respond to market pressures. "Reich has written an excellent book."-Hengameh Hosseini, Political Science Quarterly "Kudos to Adam Reich for this well-researched book! Students of medical sociology, as well as health management and policy, will find Selling Our Souls useful."-Okori Uneke, Ph.D., International Social Science Review "This book is an important resource for academic audiences and professionals in the health disciplines as well as those in the social sciences."- Choice Selling Our Souls is an in-depth investigation into how hospital organizations and the people who work in them make sense of and respond to the modern health care market.
Reich explains how these legacies play out today in terms of the hospitals’ different responses to similar market pressures, and the varieties of care that result. And GroupCare was founded in the late twentieth century to rationalize and economize care for middle-class patients and their employers. Hol圜are was founded by an order of nuns in the mid-twentieth century, offering spiritual comfort to the paying patient.
PubliCare was founded in the late nineteenth century as an almshouse in order to address the needs of the destitute. Based on extensive interviews and observations across the three hospitals of one California city, the book explores the tensions embedded in the market for hospital care, how different hospitals manage these tensions, the historical trajectories driving disparities in contemporary hospital practice, and the perils and possibilities of various models of care.Īs Adam Reich shows, the book’s three featured hospitals could not be more different in background or contemporary practice. Selling Our Souls looks at the contradictions inherent in one particular health care market-hospital care. Patients have little choice but to trust those who provide them care, but even those providers confront a great deal of medical uncertainty about the services they offer. Both a scarce resource and a basic need, it involves physical and emotional vulnerability and at the same time it operates as big business. gross domestic product, but health care is a peculiar thing to buy and sell. Health care costs make up nearly a fifth of U.S.
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