The following short answer questions are from your readings and may well appear
on your next exam. Each can be answered with a short paragraph of three or four
sentences; please use your own words and voice. You are encouraged to answer these questions now to create your study
guide for that exam.
Compare and contrast acute and chronic
diseases.
How are disease patterns related to economic
development?
What are the major factors affecting illness
in American Society?
Why do women have a longer life expectancy
than men?
What are the major life-style factors that
affect health and illness?
What factors have led to rising health care
costs in the last 20 years?
Who benefits from rising health care costs?
Why is fundamental reform of health insurance
not likely to happen in the U.S. in the near future?
What determines access to health care in the
U.S.?
What is "wealthfare"?
Briefly describe the demographics of poverty
in the U.S.
What are the long-term trends of income
equality in the U.S.?
What are some of the costs of poverty?
What are the four types of public welfare?
How has the system of healthcare been
rationalized to control costs?
Demonstrations,
Illustrations, & Examples:
The Health Insurance Racket:
President Obama on race:
Health Care Spending vs. Outcome:
Here are two striking representations of the same data on the
costs of healthcare, versus one measure of effectiveness of a system--life
expectancy.
The first one, originally from National Geographic, demonstrates
perhaps even more graphically how much of an outlier the U.S. is when it comes
to spending per person on health care. The width of each of the lines,
representing various countries, shows utilization of care, in terms of average
doctor visits per year. That same statistic is represented by the size of the
bubble for each country.
So we spend more, use less, and have worse outcomes. The low life expectancy
in the U.S. is also a factor of the huge number of uninsured we have in this
country, accounting for as many as 45,000 deaths annually. What these graphs
ultimately show is that the existing system is severely out of whack, and the
dollars being poured in are largely misdirected.
Gearing a "reformed" system toward reinforcing low utilization, as the Senate
bill does with its high deductibles and out-of-pocket expenses, might not be the
silver bullet to reducing costs in the overall system after all.
Bernstein, Aaron. 1996. "Is America Becoming More of a Class Society?," Business Week. Iss. 3464 (February 26): 86-91.
Birenbaum Arnold. 1993. "Managed Care: What's in Store for U.S.?," USA TODAY: The Magazine for the American Scene. Vol. 122. (November): 20-22.
Blau, Joel. 1992. The Visible Poor: Homelessness in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press.
Block, Fred and Richard A. Cloward, Barbara Ehrenreich, and Frances Fox Piven. 1987. The Mean Season: The Attack on the Welfare State. New York: Pantheon.
Bogdanich, Walt. 1992. The Great White Lie: Dishonesty, Waste, and Incompetence in the Medical Community. New York: Touchstone.
Children's Defense Fund. 1989. Lack of Health Insurance Makes a Difference. Washington, D.C.: Children's Defense Fund.
Gittleman, Maury and Mary Joyce. 1995. "Earnings Mobility in the United States, 1967-91," Monthly Labor Review. 118 (September): 3-13.
Harrington, Michael. 1984. The New American Poverty. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Ilg, Randy E. 1995 "The Changing Face of Farm Employment," Monthly Labor Review Vol. 118. (April): 3-12.
Jones, Jacqueline. 1992. The Dispossessed: America's Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present. New York: Basic Books.
Kissick, William L. 1994. Medicine's Dilemmas. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kozol, Jonathon. 1985. Illiterate America. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press/Doubleday.
Kwitney, Jonathan. 1992. Acceptable Risks. New York: Poseidon Press.
Leigh, Wilhemina A. 1992. A Health Assessment of Black Americans. Washington, D.C.: Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
Lemann, Nicholas. 1991. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America. New York: Knopf.
Light, Donald W. 1994. "Managed Care: False and Real Solutions," Lancet Vol. 344, Iss 8931 (Oct 29): 1197-1199.
Merline, John W. 1994. "Making Money by Denying Health Care," Consumers' Research Magazine 77 (September): 10-15.
Rose, Stephen J. 1996. "The Truth About Social Mobility," Challenge 39 (May): 4-8.
Starr, Paul. 1982. The Social Transformation of American Medicine. New York: Basic Books.
Wholey, Douglas R. Christianson, Jon B., Sanchez, Susan M. 1993. "The effect of physician and corporate interests on the formation of health maintenance organizations," American Journal of Sociology 99 (July): 164-200.
Wilson, William J. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Woolhandler, Steffie and David U. Himmelstein. 1994. "Giant H.M.O. 'A' or Giant H.M.O. 'B'," Nation. Vol 259, Iss 8. (September 19): 265-268.
Glossary:
Essays:
