HELPING CLIENTS TRANSITION TO INDEPENDENT LIVING

There is growing recognition and concern that too many of the 20,000 foster youth who age out of the child welfare system each year 1 in this country do so without the basic necessities of housing, education, employment, and health care. The purpose of this article is to outline the problems facing foster youth as they leave care and to detail, as a case study, the steps taken by KidsVoice, a Pittsburgh legal services organization representing almost 5,000 dependent children each year, to help youth in foster and substitute care transition more successfully to adulthood and independent living.     

文化转型下中国农村家庭养老探析

我国目前农村家庭养老文化的转型,集中表现在从家族主义到家庭民主;从宗法制度保障到主要依靠舆论约束;从无条件性、非功利性到条件性和功利性。这些变化带来了农村家庭养老纠纷增多等诸多新问题。要解决好这些问题,必须从深层次探索农村家庭养老社会化的新路。     

LEGAL PROFESSIONALS AS TEACHERS OF FOSTER YOUTH: CHANGING EXPECTATIONS AND DEMANDING THE BEST

The foster care system sets low expectations for foster youth, and ultimately the system produces poor results in terms of outcomes. In its unique role, the legal system and its actors have the responsibility and opportunity to change expectations, mentor, and provide a frame work for successful reform using the skills inherent in the practice and study of the law. Importantly, foster youth must be supported and expected to achieve high educational outcomes through goals that are developed in partnership with service providers and professionals like attorneys.     

Evaluation of a Health Care Provider Training Program to Identify and Help Partner Violence Victims

This study tested four hypotheses about the impact of a 3-h domestic violence training program with 752 health care providers on attitudes and values related to screening and helping partner violence victims. Hypotheses 1, 2, and 3 were that training would be related to: 1) increased self-efficacy to identify and help partner violence victims, 2) increased endorsement of the role of health care providers and settings for helping partner violence victims, and 3) increased comfort making appropriate community referrals to help partner violence victims. Hypothesis 4 was that training effects would be moderated by prior training and by prior experience with helping a victim. Following training, health care providers reported increased self-efficacy, increased comfort making appropriate community referrals, and increased valuation of health care providers and the health care system as having an important role in stopping domestic violence. Hypothesis 4 was also supported. Prior training and/or experience with an abuse victim predicted smaller changes in the dependent variables. These gains held at a 6-month follow-up. Implications for training curriculum design are discussed, in addition to institutional policy implications for determining the benefits versus costs of universal training, including staff who demonstrate prior training or experience with battered victims. Study limitations and future research directions, including the need to measure performance and policy compliance will also be outlined.     

PRIVATIZATION OF CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES

Florida is a state in flux in terms of its child protective services organization. The Department of Children and Families has suffered numerous failures in protecting children in its care. Publicity surrounding these defects have led to major overhauls in the agency itself, as well as a concerted effort to move forward toward privatization of virtually all services currently administered by the department. Many of the initial attempts at privatization have already failed; others have had to be revamped to allow for unforseen problems. It is appallingly true that Florida, like any other state with serious issues in child protective services, has an absolute obligation to search for the "miracle cure" for its ailments. But only serious attention to the mistakes of the past and the will to correct them will allow Florida to finally put its children first in its citizens' hearts and minds, where they belong.     

我国医疗服务市场失灵分析与对策思考

医疗服务市场与完全和完善市场相去甚远,存在着严重的市场失灵。治理医疗服务市场失灵,引入政府干预应谨慎合理,要充分重视市场自身矫正和其他非市场力量,以免伤害市场自身的修复能力,导致“大政府”模式以及政府失灵带来的效率下降。我国医疗服务市场失灵情况错综复杂,应该具体问题具体分析,不加区别地简单的“一刀切,”将政府的作用神话和盲目地要求政府介入并非解决问题的明智之举。     

Reimbursement schemes for hospitals, malpractice liability, and intrinsic motivation

We develop a simple multi-task principal-agent model to analyze the interplay between optimal reimbursement schemes for hospitals and liability rules (basic model). We then extend our model and assume that the hospital is intrinsically motivated to exert positive effort for quality and cost reduction. This effort, however, is biased towards quality. Moreover, the intrinsic motivation may be crowded out by monetary incentives. In such a setting, we find that a pure prospective payment system (PPS) that has become widespread in recent years can only be optimal in the unlikely case where malpractice liability holds hospitals fully responsible for expected harm. For other cases, we confirm the prejudice that PPS may lead to inefficiently low quality. Then, the traditional fee-for-service (FFS) system is superior if the intrinsic motivation is high and relatively little biased towards quality, whereas mixed systems should be chosen otherwise. Our model sheds light on why countries like the USA with a tough liability system haven been less reluctant to switch from FFS to PPS than Germany, for instance.     

经营判断原则在日本的实践及对我国的启示

经营判断原则作为一个英美法上的判例法理,在完善公司治理结构、救济董事因经营过失而产生的责任方面具有重要的意义,同时也越来越受到包括我国在内的许多大陆法系国家的重视。日本的学术界以及司法实务界长期以来在对该原则的研究和实践中所取得的成果,对我国引入经营判断原则具有一定的借鉴意义。