Finding effective ways to provide and pay for health care, in particular for medicines, is no longer a problem exclusive to the less developed countries—such as African nations, large parts of Asia, and some parts of Latin America—but is also a great challenge even in the world’s richest countries: the United States, Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. Although the economic, political, and cultural differences that exist between the poor, middle-income, and wealthy nations are enormous, all nations have to deal with serious health care issues of one sort or another, regardless of whether their health care systems are universal.

 

            Ibis Sánchez-Serrano set for himself—single-handedly—the herculean task of dissecting the world’s health care systems. After six years of independent research, privately-funded by the Swiss businessman and maecenas Daniel Morand—and with no links whatsoever to the biopharmaceutical industry, governments, universities, or non-governmental organizations—Sánchez-Serrano has brought us The World’s Health Care Crisis: From the Laboratory Bench to the Patient’s Bedside (Elsevier, 2011), a fascinating book that analyzes the world’s health care problems we are living amidst and the role of the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries within it. This book, which aims at becoming a benchmark work in the subject matter, reveals that the major health care problem globally is not lack of affordable access to health care insurance coverage per se, as it is believed in the U.S., but lack of access to better, safer, and more affordable medicines. Most important, this book provides concrete solutions to these problems.

 

    The World’s Health Care Crisis is the first book to examine global health care in such great depth, by bringing all the varying elements (i.e., health insurance, science and innovation, pharmaceuticals development, public policy and business management) together under one cover. It also provides the first thorough overview of the current state of the life sciences and of medicine worldwide.