The HMO system is often praised for cutting runaway costs. It is supposed to act as a powerful market force to stop greedy doctors and hospitals from treating patients like pi-atas, to be cut open for profit. Health Against Wealth reveals that when you are confronting cancer, heart disease, or psychiatric illness, when you face a medical emergency or your child requires complex pediatric surgery, all those cost-saving rules and artful ways of keeping doctors frugal can turn against you. Wall Street Journal reporter George Anders explains why " managed care " is so appealing to employers and insurers and how HMO bureaucrats can thwart necessary, even life-saving treatment under the guise of cost efficiency. Health Against Wealth takes an unflinching look at the profit-hungry entrepreneurs who have poured into this new" health industry" and provides alarming examples of political manipulation by increasingly powerful HMO lobbyists. At the same time, the book explores the hopes and frustr