When environmental health problems arise in a community, policymakers must be able to reconcile the first-hand experience of local residents with recommendations by scientists. In this highly original look at environmental health policymaking, Jason Corburn shows the ways that local knowledge can be combined with professional techniques to achieve better solutions for environmental health problems. He traces the efforts of a low-income community in Brooklyn to deal with environmental health problems in its midst and offers a framework for understanding "street science" -- decision making...

This important series presents timely economic research on health care and health policy issues. Each volume contains approximately five papers from an annual conference held in Washington, D.C. Topics covered include the effects of health policy reforms, changes in health care organization and management, measurement of health outcomes, health care output and productivity, the role of health-related behavior, health and aging, health and children, and health care financing.

Contributors Amber E. Barnato, Ernst Berndt, Susan Busch, Richard Frank, Alan M. Garber, James Hughes,...

This timely volume examines the health care systems of Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States. All democratic and affluent, with well-educated populations and high health standards, these countries have interacted with each other extensively over the years in commercial, cultural, and scientific affairs. The essayists, all resident health care experts, address here the ways in which their countries influence, and are influenced by, the health care systems of other countries studied here. They also examine...

Over the past 200 years, a health reform movement has emerged about every 80 years. These clean living cycles surged with, or were tangential to, a religious awakening. Simultaneously with these awakenings, out groups such as immigrants and/or youth were seen to exhibit behaviors that undermined society. Middle class fear of these dangerous classes and a desire to eliminate disease, crime, and other perceived health or social problems led to crusades in each of the three reform eras against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, certain foods, and sexual behaviors. A backlash began to emerge from some...

In recent decades, American medicine has become increasingly politicized and politics has become increasingly medicalized. Behaviors previously seen as virtuous or wicked, wise or unwise are now dealt with as healthy or sick--unwanted behaviors to be controlled as if they were health issues. The modern penchant for transforming human problems into diseases and judicial sanctions into treatments, replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to the creation of a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls pharmacracy.

Medicalizing troublesome...

This book offers a systematic review of major issues and trends in health care policy, including those related to physical health and disease trends, mental and behavioral health concerns, reorganizing the U.S. health system, and managed care and health care personnel. Kronenfeld addresses the problems, challenges, issues and trends in the policies that determine the role and future of health care in the United States. Also covered are special populations, such as the elderly and children, reproductive health, and issues cost, quality, and access to care.

Health care policies...

Over the past 200 years, a health reform movement has emerged about every 80 years. These clean living cycles surged with, or were tangential to, a religious awakening. Simultaneously with these awakenings, out groups such as immigrants and/or youth were seen to exhibit behaviors that undermined society. Middle class fear of these dangerous classes and a desire to eliminate disease, crime, and other perceived health or social problems led to crusades in each of the three reform eras against alcohol, tobacco, drugs, certain foods, and sexual behaviors. A backlash began to emerge from some...

The plethora of inquiry reports published in the fields of health and welfare in the 1990s covered the full range of user groups, individuals and institutions. What similarities or differences were there between these inquiries? How effective were they in bringing about change? Whose interest did they best serve?
These are some of the questions The Age of the Inquiry explores in detail, bringing together distinguished contributors with personal experience of chairing or providing evidence to inquiries to consider:
the participant's view of inquiries
the purpose of...