The ACA at 10 marks the tenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with essays from prominent analysts of US health policy and politics. Its contributors, an interdisciplinary roster of scholars, policymakers, and health policy researchers, explore critical issues and themes in the ACA's evolution. Topics include the role of race in US health politics, the ACA's surprising economic impacts, the history of ACA litigation and its implications for future health reform, the paradoxes of post-ACA Medicaid, shifting directions in public opinion, and much more. Offering a comprehensive accounting of the signal event in US health policy of the last half-century, this issue constitute a landmark contribution to the health politics literature.

Contributors. Daniel Béland, Linda Blumberg, Andrea Louise Campbell, Sherry Glied, Sarah Gordon, Scott Greer, Colleen Grogan, Michael Gusmano, Allison Hoffman, Jon Holahan, Nicole Huberfeld, Lawrence Jacobs, Holly Jarman, David Jones, Timothy Stolzfus Jost, Katie Keith, Aryana Khalid, Larry Levitt, John McDonough, Stacey McMorrow, Suzanne Mettler, Jamila Michener, Jonathan Oberlander, Mark Peterson, Philip Rocco, Marilyn Tavenner, Frank Thompson, Carolyn Hughes Tuohy, Alex Waddan

The ACA at 10 marks the tenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act with essays from prominent analysts of US health policy and politics. Its contributors, an interdisciplinary roster of scholars, policymakers, and health policy researchers, explore critical issues and themes in the ACA&'s evolution. Topics include the role of race in US health politics, the ACA's surprising economic impacts, the history of ACA litigation and its implications for future health reform, the paradoxes of post-ACA Medicaid, shifting directions in public opinion, and much more. Offering a comprehensive accounting of the signal event in US health policy of the last half-century, this issue constitute a landmark contribution to the health politics literature.

Contributors. John Benson, Robert Blendon, Lawrence Brown, Marc Cohen, Mary Findling, Erika Franklin Fowler, Austin Frakt, Anuj Gangopadhyaya, Bowen Garrett, Sarah Gollust, Simon Haeder, Paula Lantz, Adrianna McIntyre, Edward Miller, James Morone, Pamela Nadash, Jeff Niederdeppe, Sayeh Nikpay, Jonathan Oberlander, Eric Patashnik, India Pungarcher, Sara Rosenbaum, Eric Schneider, Michael Sparer, Joseph White, Susan Webb Yackee

Lucid and compellingly written, Patricia Siplon has immersed herself in the history and ongoing firestorms of how AIDS policies are influenced, fought over, and enacted in the United States. AIDS and the Policy Struggle in the United States is equally as engrossing and as revealing in its own way as And the Band Played On. With an initial chapter that clearly follows the tangled historical string from the first realizations of a medical emergency to today's overwhelming worldwide epidemical crisis, she goes on to look at how medical treatments have changed and grown; how blood policies were formed; how value-based debates raged and continue to rage over prevention; how communities developed to first respond to the crisis, and later organized to fight for health care; and finally-now that AIDS is recognized for the global crisis it is-how foreign policy is being shaped.

Invaluable for activists and anyone involved in fighting for the humane treatment of people with HIV/AIDS around the world, this is also an important and insightful guide to the how and what of public policy as it is fashioned out of the clay of U.S. democratic institutions.

AIDS is unquestionably the most serious threat to public health in this century--yet how effective has the United States been in coping with this deadly disease? This sobering analysis of the first five years of the AIDS epidemic reveals the failure of traditional approaches in recognizing and managing this health emergency; it is an extremely unsettling probe into what makes the nation ill equipped to handle a crisis of the magnitude of the one that now confronts us.

Sandra Panem pays particular attention to the Public Health Service, within which the vast majority of biomedical research and public health services are organized, including the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. We learn in dismaying detail how shortcomings in communication within and among the many layers of the health establishment delayed management of the crisis.

She also investigates other problems that surface during a health emergency, involving issues such as federal budgeting, partisan politics, bureaucratic bungles, educating the public, the complications of policymaking, and the vexing role of the press. Panem makes specific recommendations for a centrally coordinated federal response to health emergencies, including the creation of a national health emergency plan.

A bracing spotlight on the avoidable causes of the COVID-19 eldercide in the United States.
 
Twenty percent of the Americans who have died of COVID since 2020 have been older and disabled adults residing in nursing homes—even though they make up less than one percent of the overall US population. Something about this catastrophic loss of life in government-sponsored facilities never added up.
 
Until now. In American Eldercide, activist and scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette investigates this tragic public health crisis with a passionate voice and razor-sharp attention to detail, showing us that nothing about it was inevitable. Gullette argues that it was our collective indifference, fueled by ageism, that prematurely killed this vulnerable population, compounded by our own panic about aging and a bias in favor of youth-based decisions about lifesaving care. Walking us through the decisions that led to such discriminations, revealing how governments, doctors, and media reinforced ageist biases, and collecting the ignored voices of the residents who survived, Gullette helps us understand the workings of what she persuasively calls an eldercide. 
 
The compassion this country failed to muster for the residents of our nursing facilities motivated Gullette to pen an act of remembrance and a call to action that aims to prevent similar outcomes for all those who will need long-term care.
 

The radically humanistic essays in Arc of Interference refigure our sense of the real, the ethical, and the political in the face of mounting social and planetary upheavals. Creatively assembled around Arthur Kleinman’s medical anthropological arc and eschewing hegemonic modes of intervention, the essays advance the notion of a care-ful ethnographic praxis of interference. To interfere is to dislodge ideals of naturalness, blast enduring binaries (human/nonhuman, self/other, us/them), and redirect technocratic agendas while summoning relational knowledge and the will to create community. The book’s multiple ethnographic arcs of interference provide a vital conceptual toolkit for today’s world and a badly needed moral perch from which to peer toward just horizons.

Contributors. Vincanne Adams, João Biehl, Davíd Carrasco, Lawrence Cohen, Jean Comaroff, Robert Desjarlais, Paul Farmer, Marcia Inhorn, Janis H. Jenkins, David S. Jones, Salmaan Keshavjee, Arthur Kleinman, Margaret Lock, Adriana Petryna

People are living longer, creating an unexpected boom in the elderly population. Longevity is increasing not only in wealthy countries but in developing nations as well. In response, many policy makers and scholars are preparing for a global crisis of aging. But for too long, Western experts have conceived of aging as a universal predicament—one that supposedly provokes the same welfare concerns in every context. In the twenty-first century, Kavita Sivaramakrishnan writes, we must embrace a new approach to the problem, one that prioritizes local agendas and values.

As the World Ages is a history of how gerontologists, doctors, social scientists, and activists came to define the issue of global aging. Sivaramakrishnan shows that transnational organizations like the United Nations, private NGOs, and philanthropic foundations embraced programs that reflected prevailing Western ideas about development and modernization. The dominant paradigm often assumed that, because large-scale growth of an aging population happened first in the West, developing societies will experience the issues of aging in the same ways and on the same terms as their Western counterparts. But regional experts are beginning to question this one-size-fits-all model and have chosen instead to recast Western expertise in response to provincial conditions. Focusing on South Asia and Africa, Sivaramakrishnan shows how regional voices have argued for an approach that responds to local needs and concerns. The research presented in As the World Ages will help scholars, policy makers, and advocates appreciate the challenges of this recent shift in global demographics and find solutions sensitive to real life in diverse communities.

Throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America public health professionals and paraprofessionals work to control serious, frequent and preventable causes of death and sickness among women and children. Despite international agreement about which health programs to implement and huge investments to support them, avoidable deaths remain high. One reason is the inadequate quality with which programs are implemented.

Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries provides local health system managers with basic principles for rapid precise program monitoring and evaluation in difficult tropical conditions. Joseph Valadez explains how to adapt Lot Quality Assurance Sampling (LQAS) as used in industrial quality control more than half a century ago, to assess health program coverage and technical quality of service providers. He shows that by examining no more than 19 children from a health facility catchment area a manager can judge whether coverage with child survival interventions has reached a minimal level, and how to observe health workers perform a task 6 times to judge their technical competency.

Joseph Valadez demonstrates that quick assessment is not necessarily dirty, and can provide the information needed to enhance child survival throughout the developing world. In that spirit Assessing Child Survival Programs in Developing Countries is a path breaking text book of modern health services research that both practitioners and students will find indispensable and understandable.

National Critical Functions (NCFs) are government and private-sector functions so vital that their disruption would debilitate security, the economy, public health, or safety. Researchers developed a risk management framework to assess and manage the risk that climate change poses to the NCFs and use the framework to assess 27 priority NCFs. This report details the risk assessment portions of the framework.