This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Jeremiah A. Barondess, MD
The New York Academy of Medicine New York, NY

JAMA. 1997;277(9):710.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

In Reply.

—The comments from Dr Crawshaw properly call attention to the importance of economic forces in determining physician behavior, both individually and in the aggregate. The importance of such forces is not new, nor did it arise in Nazi Germany: in fact, the costs of caring for institutionalized children and adults in the United States were a lively topic of debate as early as the late 19th century.¹ The problem of cost was radicalized in the Third Reich, and provided much of the underpinning of the Nazi euthanasia program in the early 1930s.

That economic forces are driving much of the current wave of change in US health care is beyond dispute, but the analogy to Nazi Germany is, I believe, overdrawn. German medicine was subverted by a number of powerful forces, including, most importantly, its incorporation as an extension of state policy and the extensive propaganda campaign that denigrated . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?