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By the turn of the century, the largest generation of Americans in history, the "Baby Boomers," will be approaching 65 years old. But as the demand for health and long-term care is growing dramatically, health care programs have been shrinking instead of expanding to meet the older generation's needs. In this timely book, John R. Wolfe offers practical solutions to the coming health crisis, exploring innovative ways of developing insurance plans for the care of the large, aging "Baby Boom" generation and beyond.

In previous decades, when younger Americans far outnumbered older ones, retirees could depend on financial support through taxes from the population at large. But as "Boomers" retire and the work force begins to shrink, there will be a disproportionately large population of retirees to workers. With such a big jump in the percentage of older Americans in the population, fewer workers will be able to to transfer funds, through taxes, to retirees. Moreover, other traditionally reliable sources of financial assistance—Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid—have faced serious financial difficulties in recent years. Who will the aged turn to for assistance?

The Coming Health Crisis suggests that as funds from all quarters dwindle, older Americans will have to look to alternative programs for financial assistance. Wolfe urges immediate action to develop new saving programs and increase existing transfer schemes to head off an imminent crisis. Although tax increases might provide some resources, he demonstrates that it is more important to accumulate capital to create solid reserves for the future. Wolfe also explores two roles for government: prefunding new or existing social insurance programs and promoting private insurance options. By exempting insurance fund income from corporate taxation and permitting people at all income levels to defer income tax on accounts earmarked for long-term care, he shows how government could greatly encourage and expand personal saving.

Finally, this work assesses the value of other recent health and long-term-care innovations: social/health maintenance organizations, long-term-care individual retirement accounts, and reverse annuity mortgages, in addition to vouchers, care rationing, mandatory public insurance, and expanded private coverage. Through this wide-ranging survey, Wolfe demonstrates that, through a combination of these programs, we can care for the aging "Baby Boom" generation by anticipating their needs and saving now.

The Cultivation of Whiteness is an award-winning history of scientific ideas about race and place in Australia from the time of the first European settlement through World War II. Chronicling the extensive use of biological theories and practices in the construction and “protection” of whiteness, Warwick Anderson describes how a displaced “Britishness” (or whiteness) was defined by scientists and doctors in relation to a harsh, strange environment and in opposition to other races. He also provides the first account of extensive scientific experimentation in the 1920s and 1930s on poor whites in tropical Australia and on Aboriginal people in the central deserts.

“[Anderson] writes with passion, wit, and panache, and the principal virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness are the old-fashioned ones of thoroughness, accuracy, and impeccable documentation. . . . [His] sensitive study is a model of how contentious historical issues can be confronted.”—W. F. Bynum, Times Literary Supplement

“One of the virtues of The Cultivation of Whiteness is that it brings together aspects of Australian life and history that are now more often separated—race and environment, blood and soil, medicine and geography, tropical science and urban health, biological thought and national policy, Aboriginality and immigration, the body and the mind. The result is a rich and subtle history of ideas that is both intellectual and organic, and that vividly evokes past states of mind and their lingering, haunting power.”—Tom Griffiths, Sydney Morning Herald

In the years since the passage of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA, or, colloquially, Obamacare), most of the discussion about it has been political. But as the politics fade and the law's many complex provisions take effect, a much more interesting question begins to emerge: How will the law affect the American health care regime in the coming years and decades?

This book brings together fourteen leading scholars from the fields of law, economics, medicine, and public health to answer that question. Taking discipline-specific views, they offer their analyses and predictions for the future of health care reform. By turns thought-provoking, counterintuitive, and even contradictory, the essays together cover the landscape of positions on the PPACA's prospects. Some see efficiency growth and moderating prices; others fear a strangling bureaucracy and spiraling costs. The result is a deeply informed, richly substantive discussion that will trouble settled positions and lay the groundwork for analysis and assessment as the law's effects begin to become clear.

Few things make people react more strongly to the changes going on in health care than the word standardization. Critics shudder at the mindless sameness of standards, while supporters dream of a world in which standardized "best practices" open up a world of efficient health care delivery. The Gold Standard takes up this debate to investigate the real meaning of standardization and how it affects patients, doctors, and the institution of medicine. Showing that standards are not about less or more skills, or more or less uniformity, but rather about a redefinition of autonomy, patients, and relationships, Timmermans and Berg show instead that they are about creating new worlds of medical treatment. Cutting through the hype and fears, the authors show where the true powers of standardization lie. The Gold Standard will become a classic for students of medicine and health care policy, and will be a welcome book for anyone concerned with the future of our system of care.

The threat from infectious diseases has increased with globalization. Throughout the history of mankind, epidemics have eradicated whole regions, started the migration of peoples and decided wars. They continue to leave their mark on societies, as well as influencing politics and economies. The New Plagues: Pandemics and Poverty in a Globalized World explores the strategies of microbes in conjunction with the economic impact of epidemics. In particular, it looks at the conflict between rich and poor with regard to outbreaks, and introduces possible strategies for containment.

Utah Series in Middle East Studies

What kind of relationship exists between wars and epidemics? It is widely held that epidemics affected the outcomes of many wars and, until World War II, more victims of war died of disease than of battle wounds. Many disease vectors are present in times of conflict, including mass movements of people across borders and increased contact between persons of different geographic regions, yet disease is rarely treated in depth in histories of war.

Hikmet Özdemir’s The Ottoman Army, 1914–1918 provides extensive documentation of disease and death across the Ottoman Empire during World War I, when epidemic diseases annihilated armies and caused civilians to perish en masse. Drawing on hospital records and information on regional disease prevalence, Özdemir examines the effects that disease and epidemic had on the outcome of the war.

The information on disease mortality explains much that has never been properly understood about wartime events and government actions, events that only begin to make sense when the disease factor is considered. Rich in detail, this is an extremely valuable book that illuminates a facet of the war that has not been adequately considered until now.

This book examines the major phases in the history of health services in Africa and treats health as an integral aspect of the deepening crisis in Africa’s underdevelopment. One important thesis is that Western delivery systems have made health care less accessible for most people. Contributors direct attention to problems engendered by food shortages, acute cases of infection, the market in fake drugs as well as the inequality of access to facilities, the violation of human rights, and the recent danger of the dumping of toxic wastes in several African countries. One major implication of this volume is that there can be no solution to the health crisis in Africa until the linkage between health and poverty is recognized. The authors consider questions that add to the contemporary discussion of the place that traditional African medicine and philosophy should take alongside modern Western medicine in Africa today.

The Wounded River takes the reader back more than 130 years to reveal a marvelous, first-hand account of nineteenth-century warfare. In the process, the work cuts the legends and mythology that have come to frame and define accounts of America's bloodiest war. Of equal significance, Peter Josyph's editorial work on this superb collection of letters from the Western Americana Division of Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscripts Library enhances and clarifies Lauderdale's experinces as a surgeon aboard the U.S. Army hospital ship D. A. January.  
      The reader looks on while Lauderdale, a New York civilian contract surgeon, operates on hundreds of Confederate and Union wounded. The young doctor's clear writing style and his great compassion for these unfortunate men whose bodies were ripped apart by bullets, shell fragments, and bayonets permits us to catch a disturbiing glimpse of what modern warfare does to humanity. Finally, we learn of Lauderdale's motives for volunteering, his impressions of the "hospital ship" D. A. January, Confederate morale, the Abolitionist cause, and black slavery. The Wounded River is a must read for anyone interested in the real American Civil War.

By empowering clients to be well-informed medical consumers and by delivering care providers from the straitjacket of inadequate diagnostic standards and stereotypes, this book sets out to transform the nature of transgender care.

In an accessible style, the authors discuss the key mental health issues, with much attention to the vexed relationship between professionals and clients. They propose a new professional role; that of "Gender Specialist."

Chapters 3, 4, and 5 provide definitive information (in the context of consulting health professionals) on hormone administration, aesthetic surgery, and genital reassignment surgery. Chapter 6 takes up the little-examined issue of HIV and AIDS among transgender people. There is also a chapter devoted to issues of transgender people of color, as well as a chapter on transgender adolescents.

The book contains a wealth of practical information and accounts of people's experiences about coming out to one's employer or to one's friends or spouse. Several essays spell out the legal rights of transgender people with regard to insurance, work, marriage, and the use of rest rooms.

The second part of the book consists of thirteen essays on a range of controversial topics. They include three personal stories of transgender life, one essay on the new academic field of Transgender Studies, two essays on legal rights, three essays on medical issues, and two essays on the origins and possible resolution of the conflicts between therapist and client. The authors have also provided useful listings of organizations, centers, and Web sites.

The book has been reviewed by a national committee of professionals and consumers, some of whose members have contributed the essays in the second part of the book.

The sudden call, the race to the hospital, the high-stakes operation—the drama of transplant surgery is well known. But what happens before and after the surgery? In Transplanting Care, Laura L. Heinemann examines the daily lives of midwestern organ transplant patients and those who care for them, from pretransplant preparations through to the long posttransplant recovery.

 

Heinemann points out that as efforts to control healthcare costs gain urgency—and as new surgical techniques, drug therapies, and home medical equipment advance—most of the transplant process now takes place at home, among kin. Indeed, the transplant system effectively depends on unpaid care labor, typically provided by spouses, parents, siblings, and others. Drawing on scores of interviews with patients, relatives, and healthcare professionals, Heinemann follows a variety of patients and loved ones as they undertake this uncertain and strenuous “transplant journey.” She also shows how these home-based caregiving efforts take place within the larger economic and political context of a paucity of resources for patients and caregivers, who ultimately must surmount numerous obstacles. The author concludes that the many snags encountered by transplant patients and loved ones make a clear case for more comprehensive health and social policy that treats care as a necessarily shared public responsibility.  

 

An illuminating look at the long transplant journey, Transplanting Care also offers broader insight into how we handle infirmity in America—and how we might do a better job of doing so. 

 

Winner of the 2008 Arthur J. Viseltear Prize from the American Public Health Association and Nominated for the 2008 William H. Welch Medal, AAHM

Though notorious for its polluted air today, the city of Los Angeles once touted itself as a health resort. After the arrival of the transcontinental railroad in 1876, publicists launched a campaign to portray the city as the promised land, circulating countless stories of miraculous cures for the sick and debilitated. As more and more migrants poured in, however, a gap emerged between the city’s glittering image and its dark reality.

            Emily K. Abel shows how the association of the disease with “tramps” during the 1880s and 1890s and Dust Bowl refugees during the 1930s provoked exclusionary measures against both groups. In addition, public health officials sought not only to restrict the entry of Mexicans (the majority of immigrants) during the 1920s but also to expel them during the 1930s. 

            Abel’s revealing account provides a critical lens through which to view both the contemporary debate about immigration and the U.S. response to the emergent global tuberculosis epidemic.