Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past forty years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency—and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. This second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise details a better approach, offering fundamental reform alternatives centering on tax changes, insurance market changes, and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid.

In this book, Charles E. Phelps provides a comprehensive look at our health care system, including how the current system evolved, how the health care sector behaves, and a detailed analysis of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" parts of the system—from technological advances (the "good") to variations in treatment patterns (the "bad") to hidden costs and perverse incentives (the "ugly"). He shows that much of the cost of health care ultimately derives from our own lifestyle choices and, thus, that education may well be that the most powerful form of health reform we can envision.