Inequalities

Tag: health

  • Did Labour’s social policies fail or succeed 1997-2010?

    It’s impossible to begin telling a story without knowing the ending. So after 13 years in office (1997-2010), it is only now possible to write the story of New Labour’s social policy record – what they aimed to do, what they spent, and what it achieved – and this is just what a team of…

  • Who Gets Health Care Priority? Resource Allocation in a Middle Income Country

    Adriane Gelpi, a doctoral candidate in Health Policy at Harvard and a fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, describes the intricate ethics and politics of health care resource allocation in Chile. This was originally posted on the Safra Center blog. Imagine that you are the Minister of Health for Chile, a middle-income…

  • Social Factors and the Evaluation of Mental Disorders

    The American Psychiatric Association is set to release the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) this month. These new guidelines will have a profound effect on how clinicians diagnose mental disorders, how health insurers reimburse for treatment, how drug makers market their products, and how the government determines benefits…

  • Ease off the alarm bells: New data on ADHD diagnosis rates

    The New York Times has a cover story today reporting on the estimated prevalence of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder from the 2011-2012 National Survey of Children’s Health (they don’t identify the survey by name). The story is going to get a lot of people interested in what is happening to children — every new datapoint on ADHD…

  • The red rag of health incentives

    In this guest post, Harald Schmidt from the University of Pennsylvania takes apart the media furore about a proposal  (at least as reported) to cut payments to unhealthy benefit claimants if they didn’t go to the gym – using the insights gained from his previous work on the ethics of incentives in health & social policy. Health…

  • Adding Health Care Spending to the Poverty Equation

    I discussed the challenges of measuring poverty in the United States in a three part series on this blog last year. The official poverty line is based on pre-tax income adjusted for household size. The main alternative to the official poverty measure is the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which adjusts for many more…

  • Paul Gregg: new ideas for disability, employment and welfare reform

    While cuts to benefits and services will affect most people in the UK, disabled people have arguably been ‘the hardest hit’ – but while this makes the newspapers on a regular basis, academics have been slower to try and piece together what has been happening. So with the fantastic Ruth Patrick, we organised a one-day event in Leeds last…

  • The Cost of a Disabled Sibling

    If you have brothers or sisters, then you already know that an important piece of your childhood experience is out of your control. You cannot control whether your siblings are kind or cruel, generous or stingy, and you certainly cannot control whether your siblings will grow up needing special attention and support. When children have…

  • Life Expectancy in the U.S. is Getting Shorter for the Least Educated

    The late 20th century brought landmark public health movements to the United States, like the control of tobacco, and medical breakthroughs in the treatment of heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy surged overall, but today the lower educated are still stuck in a different era. From a new paper in Health Affairs (behind a paywall):…

  • Give George W. Bush Some Credit for this Community Health Success

    The United States does not have a National Health Service – certainly nothing that we could display with a choreographed song and dance routine – but the federal government does support an extensive network of safety net health clinics. According to recent figures, 19.5 million individuals receive treatment every year at 1,124 Federally Qualified Health…