Analyzing Form, Function, and Financing of the U.S. Health Care System

This book emphasizes developing an overall and basic understanding of the function, structure, and financing of the US healthcare system, with an emphasis on the medical care system. It provides a comprehensive broad-based understanding of the programmatic function of the system, especially the medical care system, with enough information regarding both structure and financing to understand how this complicated system works. The book also discusses the impact of policy decisions on the services available.

Dr. Paula Stamps Duston earned her PhD degree from the School of Public Health at the University of Oklahoma. She currently is teaching in the Commonwealth Honors College at the University of Massachusetts and serves as the graduate program director for public health in the university’s School of Public Health and Health Sciences. She is best known for her research in developing validated scales to measure the level of satisfaction of direct care providers, including both nurses and physicians. Her nurse satisfaction instrument, the Index of Work Satisfaction (IWS), is the most widely used in the field and is recommended by the American Nursing Association and JCAHCO for use as a quality indicator.