Doctors are People Too: A Treatise on Health Care, by Prabhjot Uppal. Danbury, CT, Rutledge Books, Inc. Publishers. 121 pages, $16.95, hard cover.

This text is written by a female physician whose father also is a physician. As a young child she sat in his office and observed patients being diagnosed and treated. As a teenager she made house calls with her father. Thus she grew up in an environment of care. This background, in addition to her medical preparation, gave her deep insights into the role of physicians as well as the structure of care in this country.

In the 23 chapters in this text, she clearly spells out how the for-profit system run by HMOs and other insurance types inhibits the care of patients and gives large sums to nonproviders. She presents a model that would reduce costs and benefit patients by a fee for service design that would focus on care as a dynamic right of patients.

She notes that medical care has gone from being focused on healing, health, and welfare to being a business concerned more with economics. She envisions this as a Greek tragedy. She proposes a model that completely eliminates the presently costly system by a fee-for-service model that reduces costs dramatically and also provides for the services of other types of health professionals.

This penetrating analysis of how patients are lost in a sea of economics, instead of an ocean of care, should stimulate the readers to consider how to move steadily in this direction and to be of strong assistance in the reformulation process that may occur. This is the only major country that has a for-profit system with a concurrent reduction in care. All other models are there for us to study and emulate their best characteristics.