Duke University Press is pleased to announce the second edition of the bestselling Social Medicine Reader. The Reader provides a survey of the challenging issues facing today's health care providers, patients, and caregivers by bringing together moving narratives of illness, commentaries by physicians, debates about complex medical cases, and conceptually and empirically based writings by scholars in medicine, the social sciences, and the humanities. The first edition of The Social Medicine Reader was a single volume. This significantly revised and expanded second edition is divided into three volumes to facilitate use by different audiences with varying interests.Praise for the 3-volume second edition of The Social Medicine Reader:"A superb collection of essays that illuminate the role of medicine in modern society. Students and general readers are not likely to find anything better."-Arnold S. Relman, Professor Emeritus of Medicine and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical SchoolPraise for the first edition:"This reviewer strongly recommends The Social Medicine Reader to the attention of medical educators."-Samuel W. Bloom, JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical AssociationVolume 3:Over the past four decades the American health care system has witnessed dramatic changes in private health insurance, campaigns to enact national health insurance, and the rise (and perhaps fall) of managed care. Bringing together seventeen pieces new to this second edition of The Social Medicine Reader and four pieces from the first edition, Health Policy, Markets, and Medicine draws on a broad range of disciplinary perspectives-including political science, economics, history, and bioethics-to consider changes in health care and the future of U.S. health policy. Contributors analyze the historical and moral foundation of today's policy debates, examine why health care spending is so hard to control in the United States, and explain the political dynamics of Medicare and Medicaid.