Health care cost escalation in the united states: Implications of market failure

Much of the rhetoric in the debate over health care reform suggests reconfiguring the health care system so that the free market forces can work efficiently. This paper will show that hopes for a free market solution to the maldistribution of health care are false. The free market system cannot work at the same level of efficiency for health care as it does in the distribution of other goods and services. Health care presents an anomaly to the free market system, making optimal and efficient distribution virtually impossible. That failure of the market system has led to a crisis of disparity in health care access and delivery in the United States.     

The society's tour in Syria and Jordan

Black Box: KAL 007 and the Superpowers. By Alexander Dallin. Berkeley and London. University of California Press. $14.95.

KAL 007: The Hidden Story. By Oliver Clubb. Sag Harbour, NY. The Permanent Press. $16.95.

Shootdown. The Verdict on 007. By R. W. Johnson. London. Chatto &; Windus. £10.95.

"The Target is Destroyed.” What really happened to Flight 007. By Seymour Hersh. London. Faber and Faber. £9.95     

Luck,opportunity and disability

This paper argues that luck egalitarianism, especially in the guise of equality of opportunity for welfare, is in tension with the ideal of fair equality of opportunity in three ways. First, equal opportunity for welfare is compatible with a caste system in employment that is inconsistent with open competition for positions. Second, luck egalitarianism does not support hiring on the basis of qualifications. Third, amending luck egalitarianism to repair this problem requires abandoning fair access to qualifications. Insofar as luck egalitarianism cannot support fair equality of opportunity, it cannot do justice to the claims of the disabled. Indeed, in the absence of fair equality of opportunity, disabled people are likely to be marginalized.     

Historical Perspectives on Gender, Security, and Technology: Gathering, Weaving, and Subsistence in Colonial Mission Communities of Bolivia

The present paper brings to the discussion of human risks and rights an analysis of the gendered spheres of labor that developed in the eighteenth-century mission communities of lowland, eastern Bolivia. It argues that the differential work experiences of men and women, their access to technology and to the rewards of their labor, can be explained only by combining sensitivity to gender issues with a contextual framework that takes into account the environment, cultural expectations, and political economy. This historical case study is situated in Chiquitos, one of the Iberian colonial frontiers established in the ecological borderlands between the Andes and Amazonia.     

Categorically wrong? Nominal versus graded measures of ethnic identity

Ethnic identity is a fundamental concept for understanding the dynamics of contemporary political change, but there has been very little exploration of how to measure ethnic identity and even less discussion of the implications of these measurements for understanding ethnic conflict. Through an analysis of Estonians and Slavs (Russians, Byelorussians, and Ukranians) in Estonia, we show that the ethnic identity of different groups is “salient” to different degrees and that this has significant implications for within-group agreement about political issues and for between-group differences. We show that nominal ethnic identity fully predicts political attitudes when ethnicity is highly salient because a highly salient ethnic identity sets in motion forces that cause individuals within a group to form similar attitudes based upon their ethnic identity. These forces were fully active for Estonians in Estonia in the early 1990s. In this case, nominal ethnic identity was sufficient to explain the attitudes of Estonians. But ethnicity must be treated as graded when it is not highly salient, as with Slavs in Estonia, because only degrees of ethnicity can explain the within-group differences in political attitudes that arise because of a lack of salient identity. Researchers, therefore, should typically treat ethnicity as if it were graded, and they should devise graded measures of it. Although nominal measures are sometimes appropriate (i.e., when ethnicity is highly salient), they will cause the researcher to miss something important in other situations. For example, our work suggests that if events discrupt the social processes that maintain a group’s sense of itself, then a graded measure of ethnicity is useful for predicting attitudes concerning ethnic identity and survival. In short, it is not categorically wrong to treat ethnicity as nominal, but it is best to begin by treating it as graded. Henry E. Brady, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, is co-author ofVoice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics andLetting the People Decide: The Dynamics of a Canadian Election. He has also written on elections, referendums, polotical behavior, and political methodology. Cynthia S. Kaplan, an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and has conducted extensive research in Russia, Estonia, and Tatarstan. She is the author ofThe Party and Agricultural Crisis Management in the USSR and numerous articles on comparative ethnicity, social movements, and political culture in the former Soviet Union.     

Legal Treatment of Cohabitation in the United States*

This article discusses the variety of ways state legal systems in the United States treat cohabitation, both by same-sex and heterosexual couples. The different approaches are described along a spectrum that ranges from one extreme, under which cohabitants have essentially no rights against one another or against third parties, to the other extreme, under which cohabitants are to be treated as though they were married under state law. Different areas of law are discussed, including the rights of cohabitants both against one another (remedies upon dissolution, inheritance) and against third parties, such as state benefits, tort claims, health-related benefits, and rights concerning children. The article concludes with speculations concerning why the remedies offered to cohabitants in the United States are so limited, as compared with other countries.