RYE, N. Y. (MMD Newswire) - As the Supreme Court hears oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act, founding medical director of Rye Hospital Center, Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz shows how the insurance industry has gone from promised healthcare coverage for the general public to managed denial of care for them while harvesting premium profits. In this expanded second edition of "The Managed Healthcare Industry--A Market Failure" (ISBN 1439280614), Schoenholtz tells how healthcare was turned into "wealthcare" for big insurance corporations and managed-care companies.

Professor Schoenholtz analyzes the past four decades and how legislative and economic changes have caused healthcare in the U.S. to become unsustainably costly, and its citizens to have both a lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality rate than that of the 33 largest industrial nations. His work is broken down into 10 parts that show readers how the healthcare industry got to where it is today.

This unique book analyses the beginning of the healthcare "cost-containment" era, when HMOs were first introduced, demonstrates how previous administrations used the federal antitrust laws and the Supreme Court to shield the insurance and managed-healthcare industries, and pays particular attention to the 1974 enactment of ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, to give readers a better understanding of the origins of company benefit plans and the role of Medicare and Medicaid. Schoenholtz explains how early managed-care companies either failed to thrive or ended up swallowed by the shrinking group of today's giant insurers. The book also contends that while insurers were pretending to save on healthcare costs they were in fact recruiting uninformed new patients and preying on them and their doctors with coercive incentives.

"I shed light on the arcane healthcare insurance industry from its inception until our current situation," says Dr. Schoenholtz. "The book looks at the ethics of doctors involved in managed care and scrutinizes the fundamentals of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and how it will effectively work for the United States."

Schoenholtz shows readers how the Affordable Care Act can reduce expensive healthcare costs for employers, too, while still upholding promised benefits for their employees and the country's citizens alike. By weaving political, social and economic information together, Schoenholtz seeks to offer the only comprehensive approach to this timely debate.

"The Managed Healthcare Industry--A Market Failure"(CreateSpace, February 18, 2012, 574 pp.) is available for sale at Amazon.com, online, and bookstores everywhere.

About the Author:

Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz was trained in psychiatry at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in White Plains, New York. He teaches as a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College, and is a distinguished life fellow of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and fellow of the prestigious American College of Psychiatrists. He is the medical director of Rye Hospital Center, board member for six years of the National Association of Psychiatric Health Systems, and the first representative from the APA to the Practicing Physicians Advisory Council of the insurance industry's National Committee for Quality Assurance. He has written many works that have been featured in newspapers, magazines, and professional journals.

MEDIA CONTACT

Dr. Jack Charles Schoenholtz

Email: prezjcs1@ryehospitalcenter.org

Phone: (914) 967-4567

Website: www.ryehospitalcenter.org

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