Public or private health services? A Skeptic's view

For many years economists writing on the delivery of health services dusted off the traditional promarket analyses of textbooks and applied them uncritically to the health care industry. Specialists in health care today are far more cautious. From the medical side there has been an increasing interest in the economic implications of health care organization and medical practice. Good research drawing on the skills of economists and other specialists is rapidly growing. This research offers little support either to those who reason abstractly from a market ideology or to those who are uncritically committed to socialized health care.     

DOING GOOD WELL: The Use of Quantitative Social Science Data in Advocacy Proceedings

When social scientists participate in advocacy proceedings as expert witnesses, they find themselves subjected to pressures beyond those of scientific quality. This paper considers a range of problems when the demands of scientific merit interact with the exigencies of vigorous advocacy and suggests some rough guidelines for expert testimony.     

POLICY PREFERENCES OF JUSTICES AND PRESIDENTS

Focusing on the issue of civil rights, this study examines the relationship between policy preferences of presidents and the votes of the Supreme Court justices they appointed. Through content analysis of presidential statements, relatively systematic measures of civil rights policy views for five recent presidents were obtained and compared with the voting records on civil rights of justices they appointed to the Supreme Court. The findings suggest that although a correspondence exists between presidential preferences and judicial votes, presidents have been only moderately successful in appointing justices whose votes reflect presidential preferences.     

Medicare prospective payment: anticipated effect on hospitals, other community agencies, and families

The switch to prospective payment for hospitals under Medicare is expected to have ramifications in a number of different areas. This paper addresses a select number of those areas: hospital organization and management, other community agencies, and families. Questions are raised as to the capacity to provide adequate care in response to the increased demand for care outside the hospital setting that will result from the new payment system.