Subtitle: Overcoming the Obstacles to a Sustainable, Affordable Medicine
Author: Daniel Callahan
Subject: Health Care/New in Paperback
Paperback ISBN 0-8135-2674-4

False Hopes confronts the until-now unassailable orthodoxy of one of the most powerful institutions in America-the medical establishment. Doctors and nurses, hospital administrators and medical researchers, and pharmaceutical and medical technology companies are all united in a relentless pursuit of unlimited medical progress, the goal being nothing less ambitious than the conquest of all disease and the indefinite extension of life spans. Daniel Callahan shows how this very quest for perfection, shared by society as a whole, is at the core of today's health care crisis, not only in the United States, where the costs of care are still covered primarily by private insurers, but also in countries with government-funded universal health care.

Callahan proposes a sustainable, steady-state medicine that bows to the biological limits of human nature and gives priority to meeting basic needs. The proposed medical system's goals would be preventing and treating diseases that afflict the many rather than the few, improving the quality of life of the elderly and the chronically ill, and focusing our resources on primary care and public health measures.

Acknowledging that his prescription for affordable health care will entail difficult, even painful public policy choices, Callahan clearly identifies the issues that each of us will confront in the inevitable national debate over health care reform.

Daniel Callahan is Director of International Programs at The Hastings Center, of which he was a co-founder. He is the author of five previous books on medicine and medical ethics.