Mass screening in low-income populations: the challenges of securing diagnostic and treatment services in a national cancer screening program

Funding for many mass screening programs for low-income and uninsured populations provides resources for screening tests, yet only rarely does it provide coverage for necessary follow-up diagnostic and treatment services. The National Breast and Cervical Cancer Early Detection Program (NBCCEDP), a federally funded initiative that provides cancer screening to low-income uninsured and underinsured women, covers some diagnostic follow-up tests and no treatment services. We conducted in-depth case studies of seven state programs participating in the NBCCEDP to investigate the strategies and approaches being used to secure diagnostic and treatment services. The results suggest that the program relies on a patchwork of resources--at state and local levels--to provide diagnostic and treatment services. This includes a number of components of local safety nets, all of which are unstable and have uncertain futures. Public health disease-screening initiatives need to reconsider the feasibility of continued reliance on case-by-case appeals to the local safety net for diagnostic follow-up and treatment services.     

泰国北部各民族中的儒教传统

生活在泰国北部山地的泰族及其他少数民族 ,深受中国汉族的儒家信仰及传统观念的影响 ,特别是在“礼仪”、“尊卑”、“举止”上 ,都严格遵循儒家的规矩。同时 ,也用儒家的伦理道德来处理民族之间的关系。     

The INSPIRE Framework: How Public Administrators Can Increase Compliance with Written Requests Using Behavioral Techniques

Public administrators rely on written communications to send information to citizens and stakeholders, and they are among the heaviest users of the postal service. Behavioral science research has identified several techniques that public administrators can use to increase compliance with written requests and, in turn, increase effectiveness. Currently, however, many written communications from government bodies are not written in a manner that utilizes these techniques. It remains an ongoing challenge for public administrators to identify, understand, and use these techniques in the written communications sent by their organizations. This article presents a framework capturing seven prominent techniques in a simple mnemonic—INSPIRE—that is already being used by several government bodies in Australia. It also provides practical examples of how to use each technique and demonstrates that using these techniques could result in large aggregate improvements in effectiveness and socially desirable outcomes of public administrators' written communications.     

Why decentralize decision making? English local actors' viewpoints

Decentralized decision making has created restructuring from larger to smaller administrative units, but in many places, strays little from existing arrangements. Moves toward decentralization from central government to city‐regions, and in some areas, below city‐region scale to neighborhoods, reflect a mandate for reform. What is the nature and extent of desired reforms? Using an institutionalist lens, homogeneity and heterogeneity in local narratives about possible future reform can be surfaced. This article emphasizes the importance of understanding the role of local actors' narratives in shaping decentralized institutions. This article uses the findings from a Q‐methodology study to identify and interrogate distinctive local viewpoints on attempts to decentralize decision making in England. In a systematic empirical analysis, local actors' narratives were largely in favor of relatively minor modifications to the status quo. The findings question a conflation of decentralization with participation in decision making.     

Regulatory Failure and the Collapse of Japan's Home Mortgage Lending Industry: A Legal and Economic Analysis

This article analyzes the dynamics of contemporary cooperation and conflict in Japanese financial regulation through the prism of the "jusen problem," the collapse of Japan's home mortgage lending industry in the 1990s. The jusen problem is one of the most striking examples of regulatory failure, strategic interest group bargaining, and large-scale dispute resolution in Japanese history.