The Public-private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy / Edition 1

by Rosemary A. Stevens

Overview

The distinctive mixing and continuous remixing of public and private roles is a defining feature of health care in the United States. The Public-Private Health Care State explores the interweaving of public and private enterprise in health care in the United States as a basis for thinking about health care in terms of its history and its continuing evolution today. Historian and policy analyst Rosemary Stevens has selected and edited seventeen essays from both her published and unpublished work to illustrate continuing themes, such as: the flexible meanings of the terms "public" and "private," and how useful their ambiguity has been and is; the role of ideology as ratifying rather than preordaining change; and the common behavior of public leaders and corporate entities in the face of fiscal opportunity. The topics—covering the period of 1870 through the twenty-first century—represent Stevens' research interests in hospital history and policy, the medical profession, government policy, and paying for health care. The volume also considers her involvement with policy questions, which include health services research, health maintenance organizations, and physician workforce policy. Section I demonstrates the long history of state government involvement with private not-for-profit hospitals from the 1870s through the 1930s. Section II examines the federal role in health care from the 1920s through the 1970s, including the establishment of veterans' hospitals and the implementation of Medicaid. Section III shows how shifting governmental roles require constantly changing organizing rhetoric, whether for inventing a federal role for health services research and HMOs, "regionalization" in the 1970s, or defining civil rights and "equity" as mobilizing vehicles in the 1980s. Section IV examines growing concerns from the 1970s through the present about the traditional "public" role of the largely "private" medical profession. Section V returns to the ambiguous public-private status of not-for profit hospitals, buffeted in the 1980s and 1990s by assumptions about the efficiency of the market.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780765803498
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	12/15/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	384
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)
Age Range:	16 Years

About the Author

Rosemary A. Stevens is a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in social medicine and public policy at Weill Cornell Medical College, and Stanley I. Sheerr professor emeritus in the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her writings have appeared in Harvard Business Review; Journal of Health Politics, Policies and Law;and American Journal of Public Health. In addition she is the author of numerous books, including The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Policy.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments, Introduction, I. Inventing Public-Private Policy for Hospitals in the United States, II. Negotiating a National Governmental Role, III. Buzzwords, Rationality, and Dreams: 1968-1986, IV. The Medical Profession: Between Government and Market?, V. The American Health Care State, Index

Editorial Reviews

"Readers of Inquiry have long been aware of the work of Rosemary Stevens, one of the most insightful medical historians of our time. The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Policy includes 17 of Stevens' essays, spanning a 40-year period from 1961 to 2001. It is a collection that will reward the attention of anyone who cares about American health policy, where it has come from, and where it is going." – Timothy Stoltzfus Jost, J.D., INQUIRY "The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy is a clooection of thoughtful essays developed over a 40-year period by the author, who views herself primarily as a historian with an extroadinary interest in health policy.....Rosemary Stevens has written an incisive and important book." – Patrick H. DeLeon, American Psychological Association

From the Publisher