Seminar Series Archives

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
Scholars in Health Policy Research Program

American Health Care System Seminar
Fall 2006

Reading List

Volume I

First Session: Overview of the U.S. Health System: Access, Costs, Quality and Outcomes of Care

Tuesday, August 30, 2:00–4:00 P.M.
Faculty: Joan Bloom, Ph.D.

Required Readings:
  1. Shi and Singh, Chapter 12 “Costs, Access, and Quality,” Delivering Health Care in America, pp. 483–532.
    (Book passed out)
  2. The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, “Key Facts – Race, Ethnicity, and Medical Care,” October, 1999, Menlo Park, California.
  3. Evans, R.G., Barer, M.L.,& Marmor, T.R., “Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of Healthy Populations,” Chapter by Evans and Stoddart, Producing Health, Consuming Health Care, New York: Aldine De Gruyter,
    pp. 27–63.
  4. Auerbach J.A., Krimgold B.K.,&Lefkowitz B. (2000)."Improving Health: It Doesn't Take a Revolution," National Policy Association Washington, D.C.,
  5. Health Disparities in New York City." A Report from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene_.
  6. Millenson, M. “Still Demanding Medical Excellence.” Policy Challenges in Modern Health Care, pp. 151–161.
    (Book passed out)
  7. Williams, D.R. and Jackson, P.B. (2005) “Social Sources of Racial Disparities In Health.” Health Affairs, 24:2, pp. 325–334.
  8. Mechanic, D. (2005) “Policy Challenges in Addressing Racial Disparities And Improving Population Health.” Health Affairs 24:2, pp. 335–338.

Second Session: Variation in Quality and Outcomes of Care

Tuesday, September 5, 2:00–4:00 P.M.
Faculty: Jim Bellows and Linda Rudolph

Required Readings:
  1. Committee on Quality of Health Care in America, IOM. (2001). Crossing the Quality Chasm: A New Health System for the 21st Century. Washington, D.C., National Academy Press.Executive Summary and Chapter 2.
  2. McGlynn E.A. et al., (2003) "The Quality of Health Care Delivered to Adults in the United States", New England Journal of Medicine, 348:2635-2645.
  3. Fisher,ES, Wennberg D et al (2003) "The Implications of regional variation in Medicare Spending. Part 1: The Content, Quality, and Accessibility of Care. Part 2: Health Outcomes and Satisfaction with Care,” Annals of Internal Medicine 138(4):273-298.
  4. Casalino L, (2003). Markets and medicine – barriers to creating a “business case for quality”. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 46(1): 38-51. And response: Riordan, M. “Is there a business case for quality in US medical care – response to Casalino. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine. 46(1):52-54.
  5. Donabedian, A., The quality of care. How can it be assessed? JAMA, 1988. 260(12): p. 1743-8
  6. Gawande A. (2005) On washing hands. NEJM 350(13):1283-1286.
  7. Paul Plsek. Complexity and the Adoption of Innovation in Health Care Monograph. National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation National Committee for Quality Health Care. 2003
  8. Berwick D. (1996) A primer on leading the improvement of systems . BMJ 312:619-622
  9. Sofaer S, Firminger K (2005) Patient perceptions of the quality of health services. Ann Rev. Public Health 26:513-59 (skip the tables).


Third Session:  The Prevention of Disease and the Promotion of Health:  The Need for a New Policy Approach

Thursday, September 7,   2:00 - 4:00 P.M.
Faculty:  Len Syme, Ph.D.

Required Reading:

  1. Smedley, Brian D., Syme SL (eds.) Promoting Health: Intervention Strategies from Social & Behavioral Research. Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2001. pp. 1-36.
  2. Syme S. L. Social determinants of health:  The community as an empowered partner. Preventing Chronic Disease. 1:1-5, 2004.

 

Fourth Session:  Health Savings Account: Implications for Health Spending?

Tuesday, September 12, 2:00 - 4:00 P.M.
Faculty:  William Dow, Ph.D.

Required Reading:

  1. Baicker, K., Dow, W., and Wolfson, J. “Health Savings Account: Implications for Health Spending." Forthcoming paper in the National Tax Journal


Fifth Session: How We Budget For Health Programs at the National Level

Thursday, September 14, 2:00 – 4:00 P.M.
Faculty: John Ellwood, Ph.D.

Required Readings:

This session has two goals.  First to explain how we budget for heath care at the federal (national) level.  For this purpose read readings 1 and 2.  The second purpose to examine whether, and if so, why support for “liberal” health care and other social legislation has declined in the past several decades.  Readings 3 through 6 apply here.  Mann and Ornstein focus on endogenous congressional changes while McCarty et. al. focus on exogenous factors – particularly the rise in income inequality and the percent of the US population that is foreign born.

  1. Ellwood, J.W., “How Congress Controls Expenditures,” in John W. Ellwood, Reductions in U.S. Domestic Spending, pp. 21-31.
  2. Rivlin, A and Sawhill I, editors, Restoring Fiscal Sanity, 2005: Meeting the Long-Run Challenge (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2005), Chapter 4, “Health” by Henry J. Aaron and Jack Meyer, pp. 73-97.
  3. Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 2006), Preface (pp. ix-xiii) and Chapter 1 (pp. 1-13). For more detail on the specifics of the decline read pages 169-191.
  4. Nolan McCarty, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), Chapters 1 and 2 (especially pages 1-14 and 44-70).
  5. Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, “Abandoning the Middle: The Bush Tax Cuts and the Limits of Democratic Control,” PS, Volume 3, number 1 (March 2005). Skim pp. 33-53, read more carefully, pp. 43-49.
  6. Theda Skocpol, “Cross Pressures: Contemporary Politics of Health Reform” in David Mechanic et. al. edited, Policy Changes in Modern Health Care, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005),  pp. 26-36.

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