Chapter 9: Distributing Health Care
Case Presentation: The Way It Was: Robert Ingram Can’t Afford to Be Sick is a composite
representing the situation of the tens of millions of Americans lacking health insurance. The following
analyses by Paul Krugman in The New York Times provide a useful portrait of the issues facing the
financing of health care: “Pricing Drugs as if They Were Cars,” November 4, 2005; “Pride, Prejudice,
Insurance,” November 7, 2005; “The Medical Money Pit,” April 15, 2005; “Passing the Buck,” April 22,
2005; “One Nation, Uninsured,” June 13, 2005; “First Do More Harm,” January 16, 2006; “Death by
Insurance,” May 1, 2006; “Our Sick Society,” May 5, 2006. For the effects of the 2007–9 recession on
Information for Social Context: The Affordable Care Act comes from David U. Himmelstein et al.,
“MarketWatch: Illness and Injury as Contributors to Bankruptcy,” Health Affairs, February 2005; David U.
Himmelstein et al., “Discounting the Debtors Will Not Make Medical Bankruptcy Disappear,” Health Affairs
25, no. 2 (2006): w84–w88; Teresa A. Coughlin et al., “Uncompensated Care for the Uninsured in 2013: A
Detailed Examination,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, May 30, 2014; “Uncompensated Hospital
Care Cost Fact Sheet,” American Hospital Association, January 2014; “National Health Expenditure
Accounts,” Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, December 9, 2014; Lori Achman and Deborah
Chollet, “Insuring the Uninsurable: An Overview of State High–Risk Health Insurance Pools,” The
Commonwealth Fund, August 2001; Kyung M. Song, “Dozens of Patients Cut from State’s High-Risk
Insurance Pool,” The Seattle Times, January 26, 2009; Ezra Klein, “There Was a Reason Conservatives
Once Supported the Individual Mandate,” The Washington Post, March 31, 2012; “Key Facts about the
Uninsured Population,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, October 29, 2014; Liz Hamel et al., “Kaiser
Health Tracking Poll: November 2014,” The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, November 21, 2014; Jay
ObamaCare Facts; and “New Report: More Than $5 Billion in Total Consumer Benefits from Affordable
Care Act’s Medical Loss Ratio Provision,” The Commonwealth Fund, March 26, 2015.
Further background information can be found in the following New York Times articles: Farhana
Hossain, “How Different Types of People Will Be Affected by the Health Care Overhaul,” March 24, 2010;
David Leonhardt, “In the Process, Pushing Back at Inequality,” March 24, 2010; Tara Parker-Pope, “What
Social Context: The Health Care Crisis—The Road to Reform draws on the following New York
Times articles: Robert W. Pear, “Health Spending at a Record Level,” January 8, 2004; Milt Freudenheim,
“Record Level of Americans Not Insured on Health,” August 27, 2004; Robert Pear, “Nation’s Health
Spending Slows, but It Still Hits a Record,” January 11, 2005; and Robert Pear, “Growth of National Health
Spending Slows Along With Drug Sales,” January 10, 2006.