Hard choices: targeting long-term care to the "at risk" aged

Recent expansion of Medicaid coverage to home- and community-based long-term care moves that payment program away from its traditional institutional bias. But tension over the appropriate role of home care and fears of budget-busting have caused the current administration to set goals for the states that may be impossible to achieve.     

Bread and roses: Justice and the distribution of financial and socioemotional rewards in organizations

Two studies tested the hypothesis that organizational decision makers attempt to counterbalance contribution-based distributions of financial/material rewards (a “merit” system that creates monetary inequality) with need- and equality-based allocations of socioemotional rewards, in effect allocating “roses” in lieu of more “bread”. Experiment 1 had a two-factor design (Reward Type × Magnitude of Income Inequality); 67 subjects were given a managerial in-basket exercise in which they expressed their preferences for a variety of distributive justice rules for seven different types of rewards. Experiment 2 (N=39) had the same design, with a stronger manipulation of magnitude of inequality. Results of the two experiments were consistent with the counterbalancing hypothesis, irrespective of magnitude of income inequality; financially related rewards (e.g., profit sharing, office space, company cars) were distributed with more emphasis on contribution rules (i.e., performance, status), while more socioemotional rewards (e.g., help for an employee's spouse, friendliness) were allocated with more emphasis on equality among individuals, equality across groups, and personal need.     

Book reviews

M.B. Hayne, The French Foreign Office and the Origins of the First World War 1898-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) £35. ISBN 019-820270-9.

Keith Hamilton, Bertie of Thame: Edwardian Ambassador (Woodbridge/Suffolk: Boydell Press 1990 (= Royal Historical Society Studies in History, No. 60)), ix + 436 pp. ISBN 0-86193-217X. £35.

Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947-56 (Pinter, 1993) pp. 309. £45.

Robert H. Ferrell (ed.), Truman in the White House: The Diary of Eben A. Ayers (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991) $37.50. ISBN 0-8262-0790-1.

Robert Pearce (ed.), Patrick Gordon Walker: Political Diaries 1932-1971 (London: The Historians Press, 1991) £20. ISBN 1-872273-05 X.

Richard J. Aldrich (ed.), British Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51 (London: Routledge, 1992) £40. ISBN 0-415-07851-2.

Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe's Name. Germany and the Divided Continent (London: Jonathan Cape, 1993) £25. ISBN 0-224-02054-4.     

Electrocution accident with three-week survival]

A 55-year-old man was found unconscious with ventricular fibrillations at his working place near a power press. CPR was successful. After three weeks of intensive care the patient died of ischemic brain damage. The first suspected diagnosis of myocardial infarction was revised when typical current marks were detected on both palms. At the working place the top of a lubricating grease container was found to be energized due to a technical damage: There is a round, multiple-pole plug mounted upon the container top the proper orientation of which is coded by a set of five plastic nipples. All the nipples had been abraded by longlasting mechanical stress, so that the plug could be connected in a variety of possible orientations. In actual fact, the incorrect orientation caused a voltage of up to 240 V to the container top.     

ON RAZ AND THE OBLIGATION TO OBEY THE LAW

Law and Philosophy -     

The Social Security Administration's 10-percent sample file of OASDI beneficiaries.

This is another in a series of technical articles describing Social Security Administration sample files and statistical systems. The focus of this article is the 10-percent sample file that provides program and demographic information on Social Security beneficiaries under the Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program. The article explains the contents and availability of the 10-percent sample and presents several statistical tabulations as examples of the wide variety of data that can be developed from the file.