As I See It is a collection of personal essays about health care and health care reform. The authors of the essays in this volume are primarily health care professionals who have stepped back from their daily work to reflect on how their personal experiences relate to systemic and/or public policy issues in health care. Readers are invited to reexamine taken-for-granted assumptions as they explore the complex interrelationships between health care practice, economic markets, ethics, and social responsibility. The power of these essays comes from the way they magnify personal experience. These kinds of stories have the capacity to influence public dialogue and shape public policy. These essays give form and life to the contradictions and challenges of our health care system in ways that antiseptic discussions of public policy can not.

The essays in this collection were written by professionals enrolled in The University of Texas at Tyler's MBA program. After reading a number of personal health care essays, they were asked to write essays of their own about experiences that were meaningful to them and that had changed the way they thought about health care and/or a particular health care issue. This project grew out of Dr. Brent D. Beal's longstanding interest in health care, economic markets, and social responsibility.
About the Author: BRENT D. BEAL teaches Strategic Management in the College of Business and Technology at The University of Texas at Tyler. He conducts research on value creation, income inequality, and social responsibility. He has published articles on a number of different topics, including school choice and the increasing marketization of K-12 education, fair trade, brand communities, the college textbook market, and Mormonism. He writes teaching cases that illustrate the socially constructed nature of economic markets and the prevalence of different kinds of market failure. NANCY L. NIEBERDING has a Master's in Russian literature and has pursued a career in education publishing, during which she has had the opportunity to learn many facets of the business from sales and service to licensing, editing, software testing, data management and managing teams. She recently worked in support of a grant promoting English as a Second Language training in the James I. Perkins College of Education at Stephen F. Austin State University. She now works in the Ralph W. Steen Library at the same university. HEATHER K. OLSON BEAL is an associate professor of secondary education at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she teaches courses in student diversity, educational foundation, action research, and literacy. Her scholarship examines the issues of school choice, second language education, and the educational experiences of underrepresented student populations.