Mr. Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, is one of the world"s most respected business thinkers. He made his name and fortune teaching companies his theories of competitive advantage. Mr. Porter argues that competition can save even America"s troubled health-care system, the largest in the world. He and Elizabeth Olmsted Teisberg argue in "Redefining Health Care" that competition, if properly applied, can also fix what ails this sector. That is a bold claim, given the horrible state of America"s health-care system. Just consider a few of its failings: America pays more per capita for health care than most countries, but it still has some 45m citizens with no health insurance at all. While a few receive outstanding treatment, the authors show in heart-wrenching detail that most do not. The authors conclude that it is "on a dangerous path, with a toxic combination of high costs, uneven quality, frequent errors and limited access to care". The authors offer a mix of solutions to fix this mess, and thereby to put the sector on a genuinely competitive footing. First comes the seemingly obvious(but as yet unrealised)goal of data transparency. Second is a redirection of competition from the level of health plans, doctors, clinics and hospitals, to competition "at the level of medical conditions, which is all but absent". The authors argue that the right measure of "value" for the health sector should be how well a patient with a given health condition fares over the entire cycle of treatment, and what the cost is for that entire cycle. If there is a failing in this book, it is that the authors sometimes stray toward naive optimism. They argue, for example, that their solutions are so commonsensical that private actors in the health system could forge ahead with them profitably without waiting for the government to fix its policy mistakes. That is a tempting notion, but it falls into a trap that economists call the fallacy of the $ 20 bill on the street. If there really were easy money on the pavement, goes the argument, surely previous passers-by would have bent over and picked it up by now? In the same vein, if Mr. Porter"s prescriptions are so sensible that companies can make money even now in the absence of government policy changes, why in the world have they not done so already? One reason may be that they can make more money in the current sub-optimal equilibrium than in a perfectly competitive market—which is why government action is probably needed to sweep aside the many obstacles in the way of this book"s powerful vision. In the end, though, that is small criticism of a very big book.

单选题 Mr. Porter is famous chiefly for______.

单选题 The author argues that______.

单选题 It is implied in the text that______.

单选题 In the author"s opinion, the book cannot be considered perfect in that______.

单选题 The author takes a______attitude toward the book "Redefining Health Care".