Health Politics and Policy - Science topic

Photo by Owen Beard on Unsplash Introduction Through its professional associations and healthcare organizations, the medical community has made numerous anti-racism statements in the past year, including the American Medical Association’s (“AMA’s) Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.[1] Converting these...

This open access book asks whether cash-transfer programs for very low-income households promote social and economic citizenship and, if so, under what conditions. To this end, it brings together elements that are too often considered separately: the transformation of social and economic citizenship rights in a market-centered context, and the incr...

Pneumonia, diarrhoea and malaria remain leading causes of death for children under 5 years of age and access to effective and appropriate treatment for sick children is extremely low where it is needed most. Integrated community case management (iCCM) enables community health workers to provide basic lifesaving treatment for sick children living in...

INTERESSEKONFLIKTER: Forfatterens ICMJE-formular er tilgaengelig sammen med lederen på Ugeskriftet.dk LEDER Anja U. Mitchell Socha & Bech praesenterer den første danske viden-skabelige undersøgelse af overlaegers bibeskaeftigelse [1]. Undersøgelsen viser, at bibeskaeftigelse på privat-hospitaler ikke har negativ indflydelse på overlaeger-nes engage...

This paper will argue that the Treaty of Waitangi, signed on 6 February 1840 by Māori and the Crown, has a made significant contribution to informing and advancing Māori health practices in Aotearoa New Zealand. A key focus of this paper relates to (re)validating the Treaty to improve Māori health outcomes and providing a strategy for evaluating th...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 305-312 For more than twenty years, health scholars and advocates have warned us about the lack of adequate health coverage among a growing number of Americans. Health insurance premiums are rising. Many employers, especially small employers who employ over half of the country's workforce, and...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.1 (2004) 156-159 It is hard to remember a time when baby books did not have a page for "My photo inside my mommy's tummy." Prenatal ultrasound images are artifacts of medical screening procedures, yet they are socially ubiquitous—seen on refrigerator doors; faxed to bemused but excited grandparents-to-b...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.4 (2003) 755-759 How can we explain the vastly different proportions of women physicians in the United States, the Scandinavian countries (Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden), and Russia? Riska tackles the question with historical accounts of women's entry and advancement in the three types of societi...

Purchasers of health care in both the United States (governments, employers, health plans) and the United Kingdom (government) need to be able to measure the quality of services they are paying for.1 Moreover, public concerns about the variable quality of health services have increased in both countries. Measuring the performance of primary care ph...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.4 (2003) 747-755 This review appraises an ambitious project of the European Observatory on Health Care Systems (the Observatory) of the World Health Organization (WHO) to compare health systems. The project consists of a series of booklets providing information about health care systems and health care...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.1 (2002) 144-147 Medical literature examines the specific health problems of African Americans or compares the disparity in health care opportunities between people of color and whites. The context is almost always economic without any consideration of the underlying political and cultural structures th...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.5 (2001) 899-911 The consumer of medical care is in a unique situation for several reasons. First, in general, the consumer is not well informed about health and medical care, certainly much less well informed than are physicians. Many, if not most, medical encounters are initiated, at least in part, fo...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.5 (2001) 835-849 The Poet Game, Greg Brown (1994) Why Arrow? Why now? Kenneth Arrow is a Nobel laureate and one of the most important economists of our time. "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care" (Arrow 1963) is a landmark contribution to health economics that is required reading in he...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.5 (2001) 1031-1044 Kenneth Arrow's "Uncertainty and the Welfare Economics of Medical Care," published in the American Economic Review in 1963, makes profound contributions in the areas of health economics and, more generally, in the economics of information. At the time Arrow was writing this article, u...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.5 (2001) 1045-1053 The most pernicious doctrine in health services research, the greatest impediment to clear thought and successful action, is that health care is different. Of course the medical sector has features not found elsewhere in the economy and polity, but then there is a uniqueness to every...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.4 (2001) 807-810 Erik Parens, ed. Enhancing Human Traits: Ethical and Social Implications (Hastings Center Studies in Ethics). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998. 258 pp. $49.95 cloth; $17.95 paper. Like a fine wine, this book topic has changed and improved with age. In 1993, when the Has...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.4 (2001) 803-806 Andrzej Kulczycki. The Abortion Debate in the World Arena. New York: Routledge, 1999. 246 pp. $80.00 cloth; $24.99 paper. Policy debates about abortion are no longer confined to Western liberal democracies; they have spilled over to the developing world and to the postcommunist societie...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.2 (2001) 217-248 "Judges Become Leery of Expert Witnesses," ran a headline in the Wall Street Journal a couple of years ago; they are "Skeptical of Unproven Science"--the "Testimony of Dilettantes" (Schmitt 1997). Intrigued, I began to struggle through thickets of details of exploding tires, allegedly p...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.2 (2001) 409-427 Throughout this collection of essays, the Institute of Medicine and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality have identified an issue whose importance and nuances we are only beginning to appreciate. Although medicine has long claimed to be rooted in science, actual clinical care...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.2 (2001) 457-464 Task Force on Genetic Testing, NIH-DOE Working Group on Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications of Human Genome Research. Promoting Safe and Effective Genetic Testing in the United States: Principles and Recommendations. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. 204 pp. $60.0...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.2 (2001) 195-215 (Summary of the 10 April 2000 IOM and AHRQ Workshop, "Evidence": Its Meanings and Uses in Law, Medicine, and Health Care) In April 2000 the Institute of Medicine (IOM) and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) jointly hosted a one-day workshop to explore an intriguing an...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 26.2 (2001) 447-452 Some years ago, a young man got tossed out of Brown University for getting drunk and screaming racial slurs. He sued, of course, arguing that the university had violated his rights. When the inevitable media storm hit, I was in Ontario delivering a talk. Since I teach at Brown, the case...

In a growing number of countries, health technology assessment (HTA) has come to be seen as a vital component in policy making. Even though the assessment of the social, political, and ethical aspects of health technology is listed as one of its main objectives, in practice, the integration of such dimensions into HTA remains limited. Recent social...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 25.5 (2000) 979-987 Baruch A. Brody. The Ethics of Biomedical Research: An International Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 386 pp. $49.95 cloth. Jeffrey P. Kahn, Anna C. Mastroianni, and Jeremy Sugarman, eds. Beyond Consent: Seeking Justice in Research. New York: Oxford University Press...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 25.5 (2000) 995-997 How useful are the tools of political science in analyzing contemporary health policy? Comparativists, especially, are increasingly attempting to discover trends and patterns that can highlight common points of causality in the successful (or unsuccessful) formulation of health policy a...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 25.5 (2000) 863-873 In recent years there has been a surge of interest in reforming the organization and delivery of health systems by relying more on market competition. Although much of the impetus has emanated from the United States, the phenomenon is worldwide (Brown 1998). Recognizing the significance...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 25.2 (2000) 402-414 The character of the debate over physician-assisted suicide (PAS), like a chameleon, changes to fit the cultural background -- and it is changing its character again in the current era. What once was epitomized by an angry proposition in California and a near-mythic public figure known...

This paper sets forth a model for examining the relationships between fourteen policy and politico-economic variables, and the social benefits and costs of rehabilitation. Based on discussions in early 1977 with scholars, ministry officials, trade unionists, and politicians in several northwestern European countries, as well as on documentation rel...

Section 1332 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) provides states unprecedented flexibility to alter federal health policy. We analyze state waiver activity from 2019 to 2023, applying a comparative approach to understand waivers proposed by Georgia, Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Nevada. Much of the waiver activity during has focused on reinsurance...

Within the fields of medicine and sociology, the descriptor "profession" (along with its brethren: profession, professionalization, and professionalism) has had a rich etymological history, with terms taking on different meanings at different times-sometimes trespassing into shibboleth and jargon. This etymological journey has coevolved with the ca...

Introduction The current social climate of Western societies understands fatness as the self-inflicted disease ‘obesity’; a chronic illness of epidemic proportions that carries accompanying risks of additional disease and that will eventually lead to death. In recent years, the stigmatisation and general negative societal evaluation of fatness and...

Drawing upon popular magazines, newspapers, blogs, Web sites, and videos, this essay compares the media framing of six, “fat” political figures from around the world. Framing refers to the suggested interpretations that are imbedded in media reports (Entman; McCombs and Ghanem; Seo, Dillard and Shen). As Robert Entman explains, framing is the proce...

Healthcare is a highly institutionalized field, and the organizations within it have long been subject to a range of evolving institutional pressures. The 2010 passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) has introduced a new range of pressures to the healthcare field, as well as strengthened or legitimized currently existing pre...

Articles on tobacco advertising's impact should be published in the Journal of Advertising or in comparable specialized scholarly outlets such as the Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing and Journal of Advertising Research, plus economic journals for econometric analyses. Instead, many analyses of the relationship between tobacco adve...

The eight articles on the governance of communicable disease control in Europe in this issue contribute information and insight to the literature on health politics, policy, and law. Each is a carefully researched and well-argued analysis of a subject on which its authors are experts. The set will be useful to scholars of comparative health policy...

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act marked a watershed in U.S. health policy, but controversy over its passage rages on, and much uncertainty surrounds the law's transformation from blueprint into operational program. How can the experience of other nations help us to reconcile the competing goals of universal coverage, cost control, and...

Written before the launch of Barack Obama’s reform campaign, this history of presidential leadership in health policy making is a timely addition to the large and growing number of publications about the evolution of the U.S. health care debate, and puts the current initiative in historical perspective. James Morone is the former editor of the Jour...

The U.S. Interstate Highway System was inspired by Germany’s. Sushi and pizza have become some of America’s favorite foods. So why not borrow from foreign models to reform the most expensive and inequitable health care system in the developed world? U.S. researchers’ interest in cross-national comparative studies has increased in recent years, and...

Dr. Ruger is Co-Director of the Yale/World Health Organization (WHO) Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion, Policy and Research and an Interdisciplinary Research Methods Core Investigator for the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS. She has authored numerous theoretical and empirical studies on the equity and efficiency of health syst...

This paper reports the results of a Fall 2005 survey of US health economists, the first in over 18 years. Where appropriate, the results are compared with the earlier findings of Feldman and Morrisey (J. Health Politics Policy Law 1990; 15(3):627-646). The paper describes the demographics and training of health economists. It also describes how emp...

When Joan Scott advocated gender as a category of historical analysis, she argued for both the ubiquity and usefulness of gender. The four essays that follow seek to make a similar case for age as a universal, yet fluid category that illuminates the historical contingencies of agency and power as well as the subjectivity of childhood experience. Or...

The proposed paper aims to examine the utility of social justice coursework for public health students. Using the issue of human trafficking, an important social justice issue, the authors will illustrate how course work in social justice connects public health students to emerging public health issues and provides a framework for stimulating stude...

Health maintenance organizations or HMOs were the object of many of the most bitter criticisms of American health care at the end of the twentieth century. Media accounts drew on experiences of doctors and patients to depict HMOs as impersonal, bureaucratic entities that were primarily interested in controlling costs (or generating profits) rather...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.6 (2004) vi, 1035-1044 Some people find health policy boring. Readers of this journal will undoubtedly consider this claim to be amazing, even unbelievable. Nonetheless it's true. I have proof, courtesy of our good friends in Hollywood. It seems that in the spring of 2003, the people in charge of Mirama...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.6 (2004) 1235-1238 In the past few years, several edited books have been published on the challenges of providing health and income security to an aging population. To this list should be added the valuable collection Policies for an Aging Society, edited by Stuart H. Altman and David I. Shactman. This...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.6 (2004) 1227-1234 Concerns about population aging and increased longevity dominate many of our social policy debates. Ironically, despite all of the attention population aging receives, long-term care remains "largely off the political radar screen in any meaningful way" (Kane 2001). This is striking b...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.6 (2004) 1238-1241 Given the fact that Medicare is the second largest program in the federal budget (behind Social Security), it has received less attention from political scientists than might be expected. There are important works on the politics of the program's founding, but much of the literature o...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.6 (2004) 1241-1247 Conventional wisdom has managed care on the ropes or two shoulders to the canvas. Patient frustrations with managed care bureaucracies, combined with physician anger at institutional incursions on clinical autonomy, have led to popular rebellion and subsequent industry retooling. Medi...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 815-834 In his pathbreaking book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr sought to demonstrate how physicians parlayed their "cultural authority" into social privilege, economic power, and political influence.Starr argued that physicians were able to suppress all chal...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 869-883 With these evocative words, written at a time when a brief era of anticorporate sentiment and of belief in government as a potential force for the public good was ending, Paul Starr concluded "The Coming of the Corporation," the final chapter of The Social Transformation of American Med...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 569-573 The occasion of this special issue provided a good reason to review what led this journal, in early 1982, to accept for publication a chapter from Paul Starr's then forthcoming book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. Looking back at what we then wrote—as editor and managin...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 757-780 There can be little doubt that Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982) (referred to in short as TSTAM), a study in the history of medicine, has enjoyed its most prominent success in realms outside the history of medicine (see Howell, this issue, and Jost, this...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 1005-1019 When a book is published, most authors worry that it will be criticized. Two decades later, they are generally happy if it receives any criticism whatsoever. A citation is a secret pleasure, and sharp words that once would have cut to the quick can now be treated almost as a complimen...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 701-733 In the closing chapters of The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr weaves a tight, apparently seamless story of economics, politics, social movements, and organizational change in the U.S. health care system. Throughout the 1960s, even as liberal reformers moun...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 735-756 According to Paul Starr, in The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), the cultural triumph of progressivism, coupled with institutional changes, established a system of authority based in the scientific profession of medicine rather than on any person who claimed to be a do...

In the opening pages of The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr writes of the central place of science in building medicine’s dominance as a social institution in twentieth-century America. Science, it seems, provided one essential element —a crucial pillar of intellectual and social authority bolstering the growing status...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 679-699 In The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr argues that physicians in the United States exercise authority over patients, fellow workers in health care, and even the public at large. This authority spills over its clinical boundaries into arenas of political act...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 853-868 In his opening sentence of The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr writes, "The dream of reason did not take power into account" (3). He might have added, "The dream of power did not take reason into account." The thrust of the book is to examine the interplay...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 885-905 Paul Starr, in The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982) (hereafter TSTAM), discussed his expectations for major changes in the U.S. hospital sector. In particular, he focused on the transformation of what were then largely independent, freestanding, nonprofit hospitals into...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 781-797 By any measure, Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982) (henceforth TSTAM) has been an enormous success. Recipient of prizes almost too numerous to count, the book catapulted its author, a previously little-known junior faculty member at Harvard University, in...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) vi, 557-568 More than twenty years ago, Paul Starr's The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982) found a receptive general readership and stimulated academics across the disciplines to take stock of medicine's historical trajectory. It was an exploration of medical care that had unpre...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 969-1004 As it unfolds, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982) becomes progressively less about medicine and more about America. Of course the two stories are intertwined throughout the book. As Paul Starr explains to his readers early on, "It is not possible, as I see it, to und...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.3 (2004) 525-528 Reform efforts have dominated health care systems for well over a decade. Most reforms have focused on controlling escalating costs, whereas a few others have focused on underlying governance structures that impede the ability of systems to respond to new demands. Happily marrying effic...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.3 (2004) 529-538 Tim Jost begins his new book with a bold comparison. The devastating attacks on September 11, 2001, killed 3,056 people and caused huge economic losses. Within days, political leaders and the American people responded forcefully with new governmental and private initiatives and resolve....

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 313-322 In Quito, Ecuador, I once saw a priest in full vestments swinging a censer over the engine of a second-hand jalopy. The family of new owners stood by, in apparent hope and faith that his ministrations would keep them and their vehicle from being shattered on the streets of the city, whi...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 293-304 The four essays herein regarding state health care reform detail analyses of successful policy enactments. However carefully negotiated through the shoals of state politics, these incremental policy developments represent modest politicalsuccesses yet continue and reinforce a troubling...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 326-329 After many years of neglect and disrespect, public health is once again in the limelight. In the past several years, journalists and scholars have lambasted the fraying of our public health infrastructure as a betrayal of the public's trust (IOM 1988; Garrett 2000). These public health...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.1 (2004) 1-10 One does not generally view the Institute of Medicine (IOM) as a source of amusement. But there is something comical (albeit tragicomic) about the series of IOM reports produced since 1999 that address quality shortfalls in American medicine. It's not their titles, which are more evocative...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.1 (2004) 147-153 Robert Burt, the Alexander M. Bickel Professor of Law at Yale, works at the intersection of law, medicine, psychiatry, and ethics. He is especially drawn to problems and policies related to death. For at least twenty-five years, he has tried to articulate the proper role for law and soc...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.1 (2004) 154-156 Reading Ann Dill's Managing to Care: Case Management and Service System Reform, I had the sensation of discovering that a picture was made by images that I had previously observed only in isolation. Programs that emphasize planning and coordination rather than increasing resources to ad...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.3 (2004) 346-357 Numbers matter in policy making. This is amply and repeatedly illustrated in contemporary American health policy. Some numbers serve as warning signs. Whenever the number of uninsured increases, or the growth of health insurance premiums exceeds the rise in the general cost of living, c...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 322-325 The last few years have not been particularly favorable to American-Canadian relations. Differences have flared over a range of issues, from support for military intervention in Iraq to engagement in an international regime to reduce greenhouse gas issues. Conflict has even intensified...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 173-175 Years ago in a television advertisement for a major brand breakfast cereal, a group of kids eyed the new concoction with considerable wariness. They then all looked at the youngest boy at the table and came to the same conclusion: "Let Mikey eat it!" In the long and unsuccessful search...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.2 (2004) 330-333 Many books do much less than their titles say they will. Emily K. Abel's Hearts of Wisdom is that rare pleasure that does much more. Just as early feminist scholarship promised, when we look seriously at the work of women, we end up seeing a great deal about our society as a whole. Abel...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.6 (2003) 1125-1128 Health care systems will increasingly face the problem of how to prioritize interventions with proven benefits. Even affluent countries, faced with situations of moderate scarcity, cannot provide everybody with every medically beneficial intervention, although this is still not genera...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.6 (2003) 1121-1125 Sick people and those who care for them have together learned a great deal in the recent past about the conditions most conducive to effective health care. Patients and their families have, with great generosity and bravery, written about their ordeals of illness in pathographies and...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.5 (2003) 781-787 In the spring of 2003, discourse within the Beltway has had one dominant theme: the power of American government. But it has been a curiously skewed discussion. The Bush administration seems eager to demonstrate America's superpowers when it comes to projecting military and moral author...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 181-194 Almost thirty years ago health economist Victor Fuchs (1974) posed the question, "Who shall live?" In a world necessarily of scarce resources, with the rise of health care as a decidedly costly enterprise and increasing political pressures for expanding access to medical services, it...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 517-524 "Who Shall Lead" is a sensible question that admits no simple answer. Who leads depends partly on whether one means by "leadership" setting the policy agenda on the one hand or moving and clearing it on the other. Innumerable sources scramble for their share of agenda-setting turf, bu...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 509-515 Each of these fine articles discusses the possibility that the twenty-first century might witness new leadership in health care. Any such discussion of new leadership, necessarily, carries within it an implicit concept of change. Leadership is new because it moves the world in a direc...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.1 (2003) 164-168 Eliot Freidson is a distinguished student of the sociology of professions. He has been particularly interested in the sociology of medicine, where his contributions have long been appreciated by physicians concerned with the ethical and social aspects of their profession. This latest vo...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.1 (2003) 168-172 I am pleased that such distinguished scholars have chosen to comment on my book but disappointed that their remarks are directed almost entirely to my brief discussion of the current state of American medicine. Since this journal is concerned primarily with health policy, that is unders...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 552-556 Over the past fifty years, many countries have made significant gains in health status for their population groups due primarily to modern public health programs and public policies that led to improved living and working conditions. However, Timothy Evans and colleagues clearly and s...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.1 (2003) 159-164 For Eliot Freidson, professionalism is much more than just a desirable trait exhibited (in varying degrees) by individuals serving consumers in occupations where trustworthiness and self-denial are especially prized. In this book, Freidson, a venerated student of the subject, presents p...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 556-560 Specifying optimal legal rules for managed care liability is a tough nut to crack. A comprehensive treatment of the topic has to resolve, first, who among the following actors is responsible, and in what proportion, when patient care goes wrong in a managed care arena: the treating ph...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.6 (2003) 964-975 In his book Inquiry and Change, Charles Lindblom pondered the challenges of democratic policy making in an era in which neither the general public nor their elected representatives seemed to grasp the pressing social issues of the day. Writing at the end of the 1980s, Lindblom (1990: vi...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.5 (2002) 866-869 The study of health care policy stands out from research in other policy areas for its sustained interest and leadership in larger debates about U.S. and comparative politics as well as democratic governance. Harry Eckstein's analysis of the British National Health Service contributed s...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.1 (2003) 1-7 On 1 July 1993, President Clinton, having just entered the sixth month of his new administration and riding the wave of apparent enthusiasm for health care reform, was striving to put together his plan for comprehensive restructuring of the health care system. At this particular moment, too...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.4 (2003) 575-584 The last time the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law changed editors was in early 1994. Mark Peterson took over for Jim Morone in the midst of all the excitement and hoopla over the Clinton administration's health care reform initiative. With all eyes on the political arena, thi...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 561-563 Over the past decade, states have enacted an extraordinary array of health care policies, including public insurance expansions, efforts to regulate the emerging managed care industry, and initiatives designed to deal with the pernicious influence of tobacco. The various authors in Th...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1023-1029 Publisher's Note Unsolicited responses to articles that appear in JHPPL are welcome and will be considered for publication. Send items to Mark Schlesinger, Editor, Yale University, Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS), 77 Prospect Street, P.O. Box 208209, New Haven, CT 065...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 28.2-3 (2003) 525-552 What is public health law and why does it matter? Answering those questions is harder than it may appear. The field of public health itself is wide ranging enough to make most general descriptions either incomplete or soporific. Public health law, the applied field of law that draws u...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1050-1052 Deborah R. McFarlane and Kenneth J. Meier examine fertility control policies in the United States in historical and contemporary context. The authors adopt the framework developed by implementation scholars Paul Sabbatier and Daniel Mazmanian to understand the policy-making process re...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1052-1056 Experiencing the New Genetics is an interesting, provocative, data-rich, ambitious, and ultimately frustrating book. Kaja Finkler's central thesis is that kinship has become medicalized by the new genetics. To support this view she makes the interesting choice of interviewing not only...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1037-1039 Barron H. Lerner traces the history of breast cancer treatments from the 1880s to the 1990s with a special focus on the years between 1945 and 1980. Motivated by his own mother's death from breast cancer, and noting the importance of social and cultural factors in shaping these "breas...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1033-1036 Maureen Hogan Casamayou's objective is to explain how breast cancer research has changed with respect to its focus and level of funding and why breast cancer has so captured the media's attention. She names the women with breast cancer whose reaction to the disease was anger turned in...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.6 (2002) 1031-1033 As a researcher in women's health policy, I was greatly intrigued by Ulrike Boehmer's examination of AIDS and breast cancer activists. AIDS and breast cancer can be described as the two largest women's health care advocacy issues of the late 1980s and 1990s. In The Personal and the Po...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 27.5 (2002) 860-862 Everyone who works in health politics, policy, and law is eager for better answers to the question that, in many variations, occupies the authors of the fifteen articles and fourteen commentaries in this book: What does the United States get for what it spends on medical care? Each of t...