168 books match the query 'Health Policy' and 11 start with a

cover of A COVID Charter, A Better World

A COVID Charter, A Better World

Toby Miller

Rutgers University Press, 2021

With unprecedented speed, scientists have raced to develop vaccines to bring the COVID-19 pandemic under control and restore a sense of normalcy to our lives. Despite the havoc and disruption the pandemic has caused, it’s exposed exactly why we should not return to life as we once knew it. Our current profit-driven healthcare systems have exacerbated global inequality and endangered public health, and we must take this opportunity to construct a new social order that understands public health as a basic human right.  
 
A COVID Charter, A Better World outlines the steps needed to reform public policies and fix the structural vulnerabilities that the current pandemic has made so painfully clear. Leading scholar Toby Miller argues that we must resist neoliberalism’s tendency to view health in terms of individual choices and market-driven solutions, because that fails to preserve human rights. He addresses the imbalance of geopolitical power to explain how we arrived at this point and shows that the pandemic is more than just a virus—it’s a social disease. By examining how the U.S., Britain, Mexico, and Colombia have responded to the COVID-19 crisis, Miller investigates corporate, scientific, and governmental decision-making and the effects those decisions have had on disadvantaged local communities. Drawing from human rights charters ratified by various international organizations, he then proposes a COVID charter, calling for a new world that places human lives above corporate profits.
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cover of A Pleasing Birth: Midwives And Maternity Care

A Pleasing Birth

Midwives And Maternity Care

Raymond De Vries

Temple University Press, 2005

Women have long searched for a pleasing birth—a birth with a minimum of fear and pain, in the company of supportive family, friends, and caregivers, a birth that ends with a healthy mother and baby gazing into each other's eyes. For women in the Netherlands, such a birth is defined as one at home under the care of a midwife. In a country known for its liberal approach to drugs, prostitution, and euthanasia, government support for midwife-attended home birth is perhaps its most radical policy: every other modern nation regards birth as too risky to occur outside a hospital setting. In exploring the historical, social, and cultural customs responsible for the Dutch way of birth, Raymond De Vries opens a new page in the analysis of health care and explains why maternal care reform has proven so difficult in the U.S. He carefully documents the way culture shapes the organization of health care, showing how the unique maternity care system of the Netherlands is the result of Dutch ideas about home, the family, women, the body and pain, thriftiness, heroes, and solidarity. A Pleasing Birth breaks new ground and closes gaps in our knowledge of the social and cultural foundations of health care. Offering a view into the Dutch notion of maternity care, De Vries also offers a chance of imagining how Dutch practices can reform health care in the U.S. not just for mothers and babies, but for all Americans.
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cover of A Right to Health: Medicine, Marginality, and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil

A Right to Health

Medicine, Marginality, and Health Care Reform in Northeastern Brazil

By Jessica Scott Jerome

University of Texas Press, 2015

In 1988, a new health care system, the Sistema Único de Saúde (Unified Health Care System or SUS) was formally established in Brazil. The system was intended, among other goals, to provide universal access to health care services and to redefine health as a citizen’s right and a duty of the state. A Right to Health explores how these goals have unfolded within an urban peripheral community located on the edges of the northeastern city of Fortaleza. Focusing on the decade 1998–2008 and the impact of health care reforms on one low-income neighborhood, Jessica Jerome documents the tensions that arose between the ideals of the reforms and their entanglement with pervasive socioeconomic inequality, neoliberal economic policy, and generational tension with the community.

Using ethnographic and historical research, the book traces the history of political activism in the community, showing that, since the community’s formation in the early 1930s, residents have consistently fought for health care services. In so doing, Jerome develops a multilayered portrait of urban peripheral life and suggests that the notion of health care as a right of each citizen plays a major role not only in the way in which health care is allocated, but, perhaps more importantly, in how health care is understood and experienced.

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cover of A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio

A Second Voice

A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio

Carol Poh Miller

Ohio University Press, 2004

Doctors of osteopathy today practice side by side with medical doctors, employing the same diagnostic and curative tools of scientific—with a difference. A Second Voice: A Century of Osteopathic Medicine in Ohio is the story of that difference. Focusing on the historical experience of a pivotal midwestern state, historian Carol Poh Miller illuminates struggles common to osteopathic medicine nationwide as it fought to secure its place in American health care.

First promulgated by Dr. Andrew Taylor Still in 1874, osteopathy was a reaction against the primitive medical practices of the period. Believing that the body had its own natural curative powers, Still manipulated vertebrae to free circulation and to remove pathology. Early osteopaths endured discrimination, as orthodox medicine and its allies sought to prevent the establishment of Still’s new healing method.

Written in conjunction with the one-hundredth anniversary of the Ohio Osteopathic Association, A Second Voice traces the origins and growth of the profession in Ohio. It recounts the early legal battles, the establishment of separate osteopathic hospitals, and the hard-fought campaigns to win equal practice rights and to build a state college of osteopathic medicine. Finally, it reconsiders the notorious murder trial of Cleveland osteopathic physician Sam Sheppard in the context of his family’s contributions to the osteopathic profession and a prosecution that, evidence has shown, fingered the wrong man.

A Second Voice is a valuable addition to the history of medicine in Ohio and the nation.

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cover of ACA Policy Diffusion

ACA Policy Diffusion

David K. Jones, Julianna Pacheco, and Colleen M. Grogan, special issue editors

Duke University Press, 2017

The contributors to this issue investigate the complex ways that policies of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) have diffused through the states over seven years of implementation. When the ACA was passed in 2010, states were given the option to set up their own health care exchanges, expand their Medicaid programs, and reform both their local public health and their health care delivery systems. These reforms significantly impacted citizens’ access to insurance. Contributors examine how local conditions account for variation in enrollment across states, analyze the evolution of Medicaid waivers in Republican-led states, show how early-adopting states affected later adopters, explore the role of public opinion in the diffusion of ACA policies, and argue for the importance of rhetorical framing when advocating in favor of the ACA.

Contributors. Frederick J. Boehmke, Timothy Callaghan, Rena Conti, Bruce A. Desmarais, Colleen M. Grogan, Jeffrey J. Harden, Lawrence Jacobs, David K. Jones, Andrew Karch, Elizabeth Maltby, Julianna Pacheco, Aaron Rosenthal, Abigail A. Rury, Phillip McMinn Singer, Craig Volden
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cover of Abortion Care as Moral Work: Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies

Abortion Care as Moral Work

Ethical Considerations of Maternal and Fetal Bodies

Johanna Schoen

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Abortion Care as Moral Work brings together the voices of abortion providers, abortion counselors, clinic owners, neonatologists, bioethicists, and historians to discuss how and why providing abortion care is moral work. The collection offers voices not usually heard as clinicians talk about their work and their thoughts about life and death. In four subsections--Providers, Clinics, Conscience, and The Fetus--the contributions in this anthology explore the historical context and present-day challenges to the delivery of abortion care. Contributing authors address the motivations that lead abortion providers to offer abortion care, discuss the ways in which anti-abortion regulations have made it increasingly difficult to offer feminist-inspired services, and ponder the status of the fetus and the ethical frameworks supporting abortion care and fetal research. Together these essays provide a feminist moral foundation to reassert that abortion care is moral work.
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cover of Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject

Addiction Becomes Normal

On the Late-Modern American Subject

Jaeyoon Park

University of Chicago Press, 2024

Addiction is now seen as an ordinary feature of human nature, an idea that introduces new doubts about the meaning of our desires.
 
Over the last forty years, a variety of developments in American science, politics, and culture have reimagined addiction in their own ways, but they share an important understanding: increasingly, addiction is described as normal, the natural result of a body that has been exposed to potent stimuli. This shift in thinking suggests that addiction is a condition latent in all of us, a common response to a society rich in thrills.
 
In Addiction Becomes Normal, Jaeyoon Park provides a history and critical analysis of the normalization of addiction in late-modern American society. By exploring addiction science, diagnostic manuals, judicial reform, and public health policy, he shows how seeing addiction as normal has flourished in recent decades and is supported throughout cultural life in the United States by the language of wellness, psychotherapy, and more. Building on Michel Foucault’s depiction of the human figure, Park argues that this shift reflects the emergence of a new American subject, one formed by the accretion of experiences. This view of the human subject challenges the idea that our compulsions reflect our characters, wills, or spirits. For if addiction is an extreme but ordinary attachment, and if compulsive consumption resembles healthy behavior, then desire is no longer an expression of the soul so much as the pursuit of a past reward. A perceptive work of recent history and political theory, Addiction Becomes Normal raises new questions about what it means to be human in America today.
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cover of Addiction Becomes Normal: On the Late-Modern American Subject

Addiction Becomes Normal

On the Late-Modern American Subject

Jaeyoon Park

University of Chicago Press, 2024

This is an auto-narrated audiobook version of this book.

Addiction is now seen as an ordinary feature of human nature, an idea that introduces new doubts about the meaning of our desires.

 
Over the last forty years, a variety of developments in American science, politics, and culture have reimagined addiction in their own ways, but they share an important understanding: increasingly, addiction is described as normal, the natural result of a body that has been exposed to potent stimuli. This shift in thinking suggests that addiction is a condition latent in all of us, a common response to a society rich in thrills.
 
In Addiction Becomes Normal, Jaeyoon Park provides a history and critical analysis of the normalization of addiction in late-modern American society. By exploring addiction science, diagnostic manuals, judicial reform, and public health policy, he shows how seeing addiction as normal has flourished in recent decades and is supported throughout cultural life in the United States by the language of wellness, psychotherapy, and more. Building on Michel Foucault’s depiction of the human figure, Park argues that this shift reflects the emergence of a new American subject, one formed by the accretion of experiences. This view of the human subject challenges the idea that our compulsions reflect our characters, wills, or spirits. For if addiction is an extreme but ordinary attachment, and if compulsive consumption resembles healthy behavior, then desire is no longer an expression of the soul so much as the pursuit of a past reward. A perceptive work of recent history and political theory, Addiction Becomes Normal raises new questions about what it means to be human in America today.
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cover of Affirmative Action in Medicine: Improving Health Care for Everyone

Affirmative Action in Medicine

Improving Health Care for Everyone

James L. Curtis, M.D.

University of Michigan Press, 2003

Affirmative action programs have significantly changed American medicine for the better, not only in medical school admissions and access to postgraduate training but also in bringing a higher quality of health care to all people. James L. Curtis approaches this important transition from historical, statistical, and personal perspectives. He tells how over the course of his medical education and career as a psychiatrist and professor--often as the first or only African American in his cohort--the status of minorities in the medical professions grew from a tiny percentage to a far more equitable representation of the American population.
Advancing arguments from his earlier book, Blacks, Medical Schools, and Society, Curtis evaluates the outcomes of affirmative action efforts over the past thirty years. He describes formidable barriers to minority access to medical-education opportunities and the resulting problems faced by minority patients in receiving medical treatment. His progress report includes a review of two thousand minority students admitted to U.S. medical schools in 1969, following them through graduation and their careers, comparing them with the careers of two thousand of their nonminority peers. These samples provide an important look at medical schools that, while heralding dramatic progress in physician education and training opportunity, indicates much room for further improvement.
A basic hurdle continues to face African Americans and other minorities who are still confined to segregated neighborhoods and inferior school systems that stifle full scholastic development. Curtis urges us as a nation to develop all our human resources through an expansion of affirmative action programs, thus improving health care for everyone.
James L. Curtis is Clinical Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry, Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
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cover of Ailing in Place: Environmental Inequities and Health Disparities in Appalachia

Ailing in Place

Environmental Inequities and Health Disparities in Appalachia

Michele Morrone

Ohio University Press, 2020

In Ailing in Place, Michele Morrone explores the relationship between environmental conditions in Appalachia and health outcomes that are too often ascribed to individual choices only. She applies quantitative data to observations from environmental health professionals to frame the ways in which the environment, as a social determinant of health, leads to health disparities in Appalachian communities. These examples—these stories of place—trace the impacts of water quality, waste disposal, and natural resource extraction on the health and quality of life of Appalachian people.

Public health is inextricably linked to place. Environmental conditions such as contaminated water, unsafe food, and polluted air are as important as culture, community, and landscape in characterizing a place and determining the health outcomes of the people who live there. In some places, the state of the environment is a consequence of historical activities related to natural resources and cultural practices. In others, political decisions to achieve short-term economic objectives are made with little consideration of long-term public health consequences.

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cover of Alternative Models of Sports Development in America: Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health

Alternative Models of Sports Development in America

Solutions to a Crisis in Education and Public Health

B. David Ridpath

Ohio University Press, 2017

In the United States, the entanglement of sports and education has persisted for over a century. Multimillion-dollar high school football stadiums, college coaches whose salaries are many times those of their institutions’ presidents, psychological and educational tolls on student-athletes, and high-profile academic scandals are just symptoms of a system that has come under increasing fire. Institutions large and small face persistent quandaries: which do they value more, academic integrity or athletic success? Which takes precedence: prioritizing elite teams and athletes, or making it possible for all students to participate in sports? How do we create opportunities for academic—not just athletic—development for players?

In Alternative Models of Sports Development in America, B. David Ridpath—a leading sports development researcher who has studied both the US system and the European club model—offers clear steps toward creating a new status quo. He lays out four possible alternative models that draw various elements from academic, athletic, and European approaches. His proposals will help increase access of all young people to the benefits of sports and exercise, allow athletes to also thrive as students, and improve competitiveness. The result is a book that will resonate with sports development professionals, academic administrators, and parents.

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