Designated a Doody's Core Title! Winner of an AJN Book of the Year Award! Who Has a Right to Health Care? What Is the Government's Role in Providing Accessible Health Care? How Are Corporations, Insurance Companies, and Health Care Providers Affecting the Quality of Health Care? And, Most Importantly, Can We Reform the U.S. Health Care System? We often debate these issues in health care policy or public health courses, yet we do so without the proper knowledge of the underlying structure of the U.S. health care system--or a framework by which it can be judged. Many health care workers entering the system are ill-equipped to address the issues faced in direct health care practice, in part because they have no ability to evaluate it. In this innovative text, Gunnar Almgren provides all the tools necessary to understand and critique a health care policy in dire need of change. First, he describes the historical evolution of U.S. health care, explaining how the early roles of hospitals, doctors, and nurses still influence today's system. He explains the complex financial aspects of health care, including the concerns of all its major stakeholders. He looks at the government's role in regulating and funding health care, and how that role has expanded and contracted through various political administrations. An entire chapter describes the facilities and services available for the elderly--an issue that will continue to rise in importance as America ages. Finally, he examines the many causes of disparities in the U.S. health care system. In addition, Almgren offers a unique social justice analysis as a framework by which the current system--and proposed reforms--can be judged. By analyzing the health care system through various models of social justice, we can begin to understand and address the urgent issues of economic, racial, and geographic disparities that plague our current system. With its clear, thorough, and comprehensive coverage of U.S. health care, this unique text is accessible to all those in public health, nursing, social work, public policy, or public administration. No other book addresses the underlying issues of the U.S. health care system alongside a variety of social justice models that we can use to evaluate, and perhaps eventually, change it.

A critical analysis of the political roles and impact of social services in the United States, assessing their influence on the values, structures, and human behaviors underlying the present social order.

In 1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt created America's first domestic national service program: the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). As part of this program—the largest and most highly esteemed of its kind—nearly three million unemployed men worked to rehabilitate, protect, and build the nation's natural resources. It demonstrated what citizens and government could accomplish together. Yet despite its success, the CCC was short lived. While more controversial programs such as President Johnson's Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) and President Clinton's AmeriCorps survived, why did CCC die? And why—given the hard-won continuation and expansion of AmeriCorps—is national service an option for fewer Americans today than at its start nearly eighty years ago? In The Politics and Civics of National Service, Melissa Bass focuses on the history, current relevance, and impact of domestic civilian national service. She explains why such service has yet to be deeply institutionalized in the United States; while military and higher education have solidified their roles as American institutions, civilian national service is still not recognized as a long-term policy option. Bass argues that only by examining these programs over time can we understand national service's successes and limitations, both in terms of its political support and its civics lessons. The Politics and Civics of National Service furthers our understanding of American political development by comparing programs founded during three distinct political eras—the New Deal, theGreat Society, and the early Clinton years—and tracing them over time. To a remarkable extent, the CCC, VISTA, and AmeriCorps reflect the policymaking ethos and political controversies of their times, illuminating principles that hold well beyond the field of national service. By emphasizing these programs' effects on citizenship and civic engagement, The Politics and Civics of National Ser

This book provides the first comprehensive history of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), the central aid agency of the Religious Society of Friends or Quakers, from 1917 to 1945. Implying a thoroughly transnational approach, it sheds a light on the important role American Quakers played in the emergence of a humanitarian sector both within the USA and beyond. Through the Quaker lens the book adresses important tensions inherent to the history of humanitarianism in the 20th century: Following the AFSCs aid operations from the First World War, through post-war Germany and Soviet Russia to the Spanish Civil War and into the Second World War, it deals with the AFSC’s conflicting roles as a specifically American aid organization on the one hand and its position within transnational religious and pacifist networks on the other and it opens a window to processes of professionalization, the development of a humanitarian “market place” and the complex relationship of religious and secular strands in the history of international relief.

This volume explores the influence of professional service firms on public policy-making from a global perspective. Drawing on cases studies from around the world, researchers from different disciplines—including sociology, political science, geography, anthropology, history, and management studies—examine how professional service firms have generated power in the policy-making process. The chapters further investigate the structure and organization of these firms and their relationship with public agencies. They discuss the impact of strategies, techniques and models promoted by these firms on political decision-making. And they analyze how these firms have contributed to the formation of global policy-pipelines, facilitating the quick diffusion of policy ideas across time and space. Exposing how professional advisors can undermine democratic decision-making, the chapters in this book explore the potential for resistance and regulation of public-private relationships.

Securing economic growth by ensuring that its rewards are distributed to the poor and marginalised through social grants and effective delivery, remains a key challenge facing South Africa. This title examines the obstacles to effective service delivery and, in a series of case studies, reflects on lessons for delivery in developing countries.

Examines how public water service becomes a political tool in Mexican cities and uncovers the politics of water provision in developing democracies