Texas Group Health Care Insurance

With the collapse of national health care reform efforts in the early 1990s, states emerged as a focal point for new policy and administrative developments in U.S. health care. This book provides a timely overview of the key issues facing states as they have responded to this challenge. It tells how states are making decisions about health policies and then putting them into action -- and how legislatures, executives, courts, and bureaucracies all participate in this process. The New Politics of State Health Policy describes many of the major trends in states' responses to health care problems of the 1990s, and it identifies the forces that will influence state policy actions in the new century. It examines reforms now under way, from Medicaid to tobacco control to mental health, and addresses today's most pressing issues surrounding managed care, health insurance, and public health administration. Editors Hackey and Rochefort have brought together a distinguished group of scholars and practitioners in the field of health policy analysis. Frank Thompson, Theodore Marmor, Michael Dukakis, and others map out the different institutional frames shaping how each state approaches the health care domain. While some states deliberate over universal coverage, others have shifted to the county level decisions once made in Washington, D.C. But all face the difficulty of taking on unprecedented responsibilities with limited resources amid the often-conflicting concerns of public management and "moral politics". Each contribution in the volume explores the interplay between state governance and health care policy by addressing four themes: the capacity of states to fulfill their new healthcare roles, the significance of recent policy changes, patterns in the politics of state health policy making, and the relationship of state-level changes to failed national health care reform.

Health care policy and proposals for national health care reform have become some of the most contentious political issues of the decade. Garland Publishing announces a new series addressing the most significant issues in the area of health care policy and the business of health care in the United States. books in this multidisciplinary series will include studies of health care practice, the health care business, the implications of multicultural perspectives on health care for public policy, the impact of insurance on health care, and debates over national health care policy, including health care reform. This collection of timely works will offer significant scholarly perspectives on one of the most important issues in public policy. An unfulfilled promise This book examines why educational investments by African American women, the group in American society that is most susceptible to being poor, have not reduced poverty as expected. In the United States, public policies rely heavily on education as the powerful mechanism by which economic opportunity will be provided. However, although African American women followed the prescription set forth by human capital theory and increased their educational attainment from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the promised payoffs to additional schooling did not materialize. An important indirect effect The analysis in this study reveals that the ability of human capital investment to alleviate poverty for African American women differs depending on whether one estimates private or social returns. In the individual-level analysis, education is a strong negative determinant of poverty and is equally sensitive for each time periodstudied. Education is also a critical mediating variable between family of origin, teen birth, and poverty, suggesting its important indirect effect on women's later economic prosperity.