Governing Health or The Fragmented World of the Social

Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy

Author: Carol S Weissert

Governing Health examines health care policy making from a long-term, political perspective, describing how Congress, the president, special interest groups, bureaucracy, and state governments help define health policy problems and find politically feasible solutions. The third edition of this pathbreaking book is updated to cover recent legislative efforts, including the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

Praise for previous editions of Governing Health

Nancy Milio

This is a political science book that presents a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of the institutions and process of healthcare policymaking. It is based on a review and assessment of the literature and on some original research on the changes in healthcare policymaking over the last 50 years, through the mid-1990s. It includes a comparison of Federal and state policymaking and concludes with a prognosis for healthcare reform. The purpose is to provide a text written by political scientists for use in health politics courses. The authors are well-qualified, having done extensive and recognized research in healthcare policymaking. The book is appropriate for many audiences interested in understanding and acting in healthcare policy arenas. The book has a moderate number of charts, tables, and boxes that synthesize the text. It also has an extensive, 23-page bibliography and a list of acronyms. The font is rather small. This text provides interested audiences with as much useable detail and insight as they would need for applied purposes in the fields of health policy analysis, action, and education. It should prove a lasting reference for several years for theoretical and practical purposes in healthcare policy arenas as they now move between Federal and state governments, between public and private sectors, between elected officials and private interest groups, both commercial and voluntary, professional and public interest. The changing impact of the AMA over 50 years is among the policy influences that are highlighted.

Doody Review Services

Reviewer: Nancy Milio, PhD, FAAN, FAPHA (University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Public Health)
Description: This is a political science book that presents a comprehensive synthesis and analysis of the institutions and process of healthcare policymaking. It is based on a review and assessment of the literature and on some original research on the changes in healthcare policymaking over the last 50 years, through the mid-1990s. It includes a comparison of Federal and state policymaking and concludes with a prognosis for healthcare reform.
Purpose: The purpose is to provide a text written by political scientists for use in health politics courses. The authors are well-qualified, having done extensive and recognized research in healthcare policymaking.
Audience: The book is appropriate for many audiences interested in understanding and acting in healthcare policy arenas.
Features: The book has a moderate number of charts, tables, and boxes that synthesize the text. It also has an extensive, 23-page bibliography and a list of acronyms. The font is rather small.
Assessment: This text provides interested audiences with as much useable detail and insight as they would need for applied purposes in the fields of health policy analysis, action, and education. It should prove a lasting reference for several years for theoretical and practical purposes in healthcare policy arenas as they now move between Federal and state governments, between public and private sectors, between elected officials and private interest groups, both commercial and voluntary, professional and public interest. The changing impact of the AMA over 50 years is among the policy influences that are highlighted.

Booknews

Health policy, like all exercises in politics, is about the wielding of power, note Carol Weissert (political science, Michigan State U.) and William Weissert (health management and policy, U. of Michigan). They present the history of U.S. health care policy as the product of the American system of government, combining ideological polarization and party politics, the dynamics of congressional needs for reelection and vote-trading, the discretionary power of the bureaucracy in its dealings with government and the public, the well- financed influence of health interests, and the budget and reconciliation process. Their work is divided into two sections that first describe the institutions of government and the interactions of structures and motivations and then explore the actual policy process itself. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Presenting health care policy as the product of the American system of government, this volume provides a synthesis of political science research on the institutions of government and the policy process, and an extensive review of the policies that have governed health care for a generation or more. Paper edition (unseen), $24.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Rating

4 Stars! from Doody

Table of Contents:

	Acknowledgments
	Introduction	1
I	Health Policy and Institutions
1	Congress	15
2	The Presidency	72
3	Interest Groups	110
4	Bureaucracy	154
5	States and Health Care Reform	192
II	Health and the Policy Process
6	The Policy Process	245
7	Applying Theory to Reality: The Case of the Balanced Budget Act	281
	Conclusion	318
	List of Abbreviations	329
	References	331
	Index	361

Book about: Medical Billing and Coding Demystified or All I Need To Know About Manufacturing I Learned In Joes Garage

The Fragmented World of the Social: Essays in Social and Political Philosophy

Author: Axel Honneth

The essays in this book weave together insights and arguments from such diverse traditions as German critical theory, French philosophy and social theory, and recent Anglo-American moral and political theory, offering a unique approach to the political and theoretical consequences of the modernism/postmodernism discussion. Through an analysis of central themes in classical Marxism and early critical theory, the author shows how recent work in a variety of traditions converges on the need to question familiar distinctions between material production and culture, the public and the private, and the political and the social, and to reconsider the conceptions of agency and power that have informed them.

Views from the South or Right Answers

Views from the South: The Effects of Globalization and the Wto on Third World Countries

Author: Sarah Anderson

Ever since the `Battle in Seattle,` the World Trade Organization has been featured prominently in the news. For all their talk of being dedicated to the welfare of the Third World, the WTO has damaged the economies of several countries and encouraged the growth of labor markets that more closely resemble sweat shops. Third World activists/scholars Martin Knor, Walden Bello, Vandana Shiva, Dot Keet, Sara Larrain, and Oronto Douglas examine the effects of the WTO and provide alternative agendas geared towards people, not profits.

Booknews

This book is comprised primarily of four long essays: Martin Khor's "How the South is Getting a Raw Deal at the WTO"; Walden Bello's "Building an Iron Cage: Bretton Woods Institutions, the WTO, and the South"; Vandana Shiva's "War Against Nature and the People of the South"; and Dot Keet's "Implications for Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries." Opening the volume is Jerry Mander's foreword and closing the volume are two close-ups of Nigeria and Chile, and an afterword by Anuradha Mittal. All the contributors are part of different environmental and human rights organizations in Nigeria, Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, Nigeria, India, the US, and Chile, and all weighing in<-->at least when lives and living are at stake<-->against those Northern policies of "free" trade and globalization. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

	Foreword: The Resistance to Southern Perspectives	1
	How the South is Getting a Raw Deal at the WTO	7
	The WTO as an Instrument to Govern the South
	Difficulties for Developing Countries Generated by the WTO
	Agreements and Their Problems of Implementation
	The Need to Review and Repair the WTO Agreements
	Pressure for New Issues
	The Dangers of Four New Issues
	Other Issues at the Door: Environment and Labor
	Building an Iron Cage: Bretton Woods Institutions, the WTO, and the South	54
	The 1950s through the 1970s: Emergence of the Southern Agenda
	The 1980s and Early 1990s: Resubordination of the South
	The World Trade Organization: Sealing the Defeat of the South
	Strategy for Change
	War Against Nature and the People of the South	91
	Globalization of India's Agriculture
	The Driving Forces behind Globalization of Agriculture
	Implications for Developing Countries and Least Developed Countries	126
	Dashed Expectations in Developing Countries
	Abuses of the Multilateral Rules-based System by Developed Countries
	Marginalization for Least Developed Countries
	Future Implications for Developing Countries
	New Pressures from Developed Countries
	Millennial Challenges
	Further and More Fundamental Aims
	Two Cases of Corporate Rule	155
	The Case of Chile: Dictatorship and Neoliberalism
	The Case of Nigeria: Corporate Oil and Tribal Blood
	Afterword	164

Read also The Complete Guide to Writing Web Based Advertising Copy to Get the Sale or Pro Novell Open Enterprise Server

Right Answers: Short Takes on Big Issues: Separating Fact from Fantasy

Author: Alan Caruba

Collection of best columns that Alan Caruba has written about environmentalism, animal rights, energy issues, the education system, immigration policies, United Nations, Islamic Holy War and others. These columns have appeared in major newspapers, magazines and the internet.

Poisonous Affair or Almanac of Political Corruption Scandals and Dirty Politics

Poisonous Affair: America, Iraq, and the Gassing of Halabja

Author: Joost R Hiltermann

In March 1988, during the Iran-Iraq war, thousands were killed in a chemical attack on a town in Iraqi Kurdistan. Both sides accused the other. Gradually it emerged that Saddam Hussein, with the tacit support of his western allies, was responsible. This book tells the story of the gassing of Halabja, and how Iraq amassed chemical weapons to target Iranian soldiers and Kurdish villagers as America looked the other way. Today, as the Middle East sinks further into turmoil, these policies are coming back to haunt the West.

The Washington Post - Fawaz A. Gerges

Hiltermann's A Poisonous Affair is a chilling account of the gassing of Halabja, a village in Iraq's Kurdish region, in March 1988 and the subsequent counterinsurgency campaign known as Anfal ("The Spoils"), in which some 80,000 Kurdish civilians were driven from their homes by poison gas, hauled to transit centers, sorted by age and sex, and carted off to execution sites in Iraq's western desert…A Poisonous Affair shows clearly that U.S. policymakers knew Iraq had gassed Halabja but instructed American diplomats to cast partial blame on Iran. By Hiltermann's persuasive account, the United States sacrificed universal norms at the altar of Cold War calculations and short-term gain, a choice that set the stage for America's current deadly embrace with Iraq as well as for Iran's quest to develop weapons of mass destruction.

Books about: International Human Rights or Modern Weapons Caching

Almanac of Political Corruption, Scandals and Dirty Politics

Author: Kim Long

Watergate. Billygate. Iran-Contra. Teapot Dome. Monica Lewinsky.American history is marked by era-defining misdeeds, indiscretions, and the kind of tabloid-ready scandals that politicians seem to do better than anyone else. Now, for the first time, one volume brings together 300 years of political wrongdoing in an illustrated history of politicians gone wild—proving that today’s scoundrels aren’t the first, worst, and surely won’t be the last….

From high crimes to misdemeanors to moments of licentiousness and larceny, this unique compendium captures in complete, colorful detail the foibles, failings, peccadilloes, dirty tricks, and astounding blunders committed by politicians behaving badly. Amid stories of brawlers, plagiarists, sexual predators, tax evaders, and the temporarily insane, this almanac tells all about:

•The only (so far!) president to be arrested while in office: Ulysses S. Grant, who was allegedly issued a ticket for racing his horse and buggy through the streets of Washington, D.C.

•The former New Jersey state senator David J. Friedland, who disappeared during a scuba diving accident in 1985. It turns out he staged the accident and served nine years in prison after being captured in the Maldives.

•Tape-recorded instructions from highbrow president Franklin Delano Roosevelt on how his staff should carry out some low-down political tricks

•The bizarre story of U.S. congressman Robert Potter, who castrated two men he suspected of having affairs with his wife. Potter won election to the state house while in jail—but was kicked out for cheating at cards.

•Texascongressman Henry Barbosa Gonzalez: he was charged with assault in 1986 after he shoved and hit a man who called him a communist. Gonzalez was seventy years old at the time.

At once shocking and hilariously funny, here’s a book that exposes the history of American politics, warts and all—and makes for hours of jaw-dropping, fascinating, illuminating reading.

Differences That Matter or Kennedys

Differences That Matter: Social Policy and the Working Poor in the United States and Canada

Author: Dan Zuberi

This book shines a spotlight on the causes and consequences of working poverty, revealing how the lives of low-wage workers are affected by differences in health care, labor, and social welfare policy in the United States and Canada. Dan Zuberi's conclusions are based on survey data, eighteen months of participant observation fieldwork, and in-depth interviews with seventy-seven hotel employees working in parallel jobs on both sides of the border. Two hotel chains, each with one union and one non-union hotel in Seattle and Vancouver, provide a vivid crossnational comparison because they are similar in so many regards, the one major exception being government policy.

Zuberi demonstrates how labor, health, social welfare, and public investment policy affect these hotel workers and their families. His book challenges the myth that globalization necessarily means hospitality jobs must be insecure and pay poverty wages and makes clear the critical role played by government policy in the reduction of poverty and creation of economic equality. Zuberi shows exactly where and how the social policies that distinguish the Canadian welfare state from the U.S. version make a difference in protecting Canadian workers from the hardships that burden low-wage workers in the United States. Differences that Matter, which is filled with first-person accounts, ends with policy recommendations and a call for grassroots community organizing.

About the Author:
Dan Zuberi is Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at the University of British Columbia.

New interesting textbook: A Walk in the Woods or Eyewitness Travel Rome

Kennedys: An American Drama

Author: Peter Collier

The Kennedys are the most photographed, written about, admired, hated and controversial family in American history. But for all the words and pictures, the real story was not told until Peter Collier and David Horowitz spent years researching archives and interviewing family members and people close to the Kennedys. An immediate classic, The Kennedys: An American Drama brings the story of four generations of "America's family" fully into view.

Collier and Horowitz capture the fiery ambition, the mythic identity, the dynastic ebb and flow, and the corrosive underside of Camelot that led one young Kennedy to say, "We broke the rules and in turn we were broken by them." The Kennedys is a fascinating and brilliantly comprehensive history that brings together, for the first and only time, all the complex strains of the story of the Kennedys' rise and fall. The authors have updated the story with new material showing the effect of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr. and the other family tragedies of the last few years on the Kennedys and their mythic role in American life.

Table of Contents:

	Prologue	1
Part 1	Architect of Their Lives	5
Part 2	The Stand-In	117
Part 3	Brothers Within	231
Part 4	The Lost Boys	317
	Epilogue	405
	Afterword, 2001	414
	Bibliographic Note	424
	Reference Notes	429
	Index	514

Death of a Dissident or The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

Death of a Dissident: The Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko and the Return of the KGB

Author: Alex Goldfarb

The assassination of former Russian intelligence officer Alexander "Sasha" Litvinenko in November 2006 -- poisoned by the rare radioactive element polonium -- caused an international sensation. Within a few short weeks, the fit forty-three-year-old lay gaunt, bald, and dying in a hospital, the victim of a "tiny nuclear bomb." Suspicions swirled around Russia's FSB, the successor to the KGB, and the Putin regime. Traces of polonium radiation were found in Germany and on certain airplanes, suggesting a travel route from Russia for the carriers of the fatal poison. But what really happened? What did Litvinenko know? And why was he killed?

The full story of Sasha Litvinenko's life and death is one that the Kremlin does not want told. His closest friend, Alex Goldfarb, and his widow, Marina, are the only two people who can tell it all, from firsthand knowledge, with dramatic scenes from Moscow to London to Washington. Death of a Dissident reads like a political thriller, yet its story is more fantastic and frightening than any novel.

Ever since 1998, when Litvinenko denounced the FSB for ordering him to assassinate tycoon Boris Berezovsky, he had devoted his life to exposing the FSB's darkest secrets. After a dramatic escape to London with Goldfarb's assistance, he spent six years, often working with Goldfarb, investigating a widening series of scandals. Oligarchs and journalists have been assassinated. Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yuschenko was poisoned on the campaign trail. The war in Chechnya became unspeakably harsh on both sides. Sasha Litvinenko investigated all of it, and he denounced his former employers in no uncertain terms for their dirty deeds.

Death of a Dissident opens a window into the dark heart of the Putin Kremlin. With its strong-arm tactics, tight control over the media, and penetration of all levels of government, the old KGB is back with a vengeance. Sasha Litvinenko dedicated his life to exposing this truth. It took his diabolical murder for the world to listen.

Book review: Pajama Day or Skippyjon Jones Lost in Spice

The Complete Book Of Police And Military Motorcycles

Author: Joseph Berk

From Pittsburgh's adoption of motorcycles for police use in 1909 to Gen. John J. "Black Jack" Pershing's 1916 pursuit of Pancho Villa into Mexican territory on Harley-Davidsons, Indians and Excelsiors to the deployment of motorcycles in both world wars, this book tells the fascinating tale of these magnificent machines from their 20th century beginnings to their current use by police departments and militaries throughout the world. Joseph Berk, author of The Gatling Gun, explores every aspect of police and military motorcycles, including the history of their manufacture by Harley-Davidson, Indian, Kawasaki, BMW, Honda and others; details of their procurement by selected U.S. police departments; critiques of the "Big Three" police models employed in the United States from officers who have put them to the test; a detailed outline of the intensive 10-day training program required of U.S. motor officers; an inside look at how specific police departments from Atlanta to L.A. utilize motorcycles on a day-to-day basis; and a look at the specific makes and models used by Special Forces and other military units from World War I through the turn of the century and beyond.

Table of Contents:

Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Police Motorcycle Concept
Chapter 2 - The Big Three Police Motorcycle Manufacturers in the U.S. Market
Chapter 3 - Other Police Motorcycles Throughout the World
Chapter 4 - Motor Officer Training
Chapter 5 - Atlanta's Special Operations Section
Chapter 6 - The Dallas Police Department
Chapter 7 - The Los Angeles Police Department's Special Enforcement Unit
Chapter 8 - The Ontario, California, Police Department
Chapter 9 - American Motorcycles in World War II
Chapter 10 - German Motorcycles in World War II
Chapter 11 - Military Motorcycles Today
Chapter 12 - Military and Police Motorcycles Websites