scholarly journals Cognition and the Crisis of Citizenship and Care

Open Theology ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-116
Author(s):  
Bonnie Howe
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Policy Statement ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
Conservative Christian ◽  
To Come ◽  
Child Health Insurance

Abstract The American struggle over healthcare policy is emblematic of the larger crisis of citizenship and national identity. We have a crisis at the structural, policy level, but the problem also goes deep into our moral lives as individuals and commitments as a society. We struggle to come to a workable consensus about why and how we should provide healthcare, and for whom. Who belongs in our circle of care, and what are our commitments to one anothers’ wellbeing? This identity crisis is spinning out into a breakdown of institutional structures and even loss of caring practices. As a Christian ethicist interested in how moral discourse works, my central concern is this: Why are so many American Christians speaking and legislating against health care programs - the Affordable Care Act, but even also Child Health Insurance Program, which covered children? They are using Bible verses to anchor and justify their policy stances. The American health care reform fight is a crisis of citizenship and national identity, but it is also a crisis of Christian mission and witness. A policy statement given by a conservative congressman is used as a test case with which to display how two experts on language could help us understand conservative Christian thinking on healthcare. Charles Taylor reflects as a philosopher on how “the politics of bringing about care” expresses our deepest commitments and our struggle with the impersonal forces of modernity. Charles Fillmore offers models for understanding how thought and language are linked and systematically structured, framed. There are alternatives to conservative ways of framing healthcare, ways that are arguably more coherent and more in keeping with biblical calls to love of neighbor and to building communities of the beloved.

The state of American health care: November 2016 to November 2020, a look forward

2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-9
Author(s):  
Theodore Marmor ◽  
Michael K. Gusmano
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Insurance ◽  
House Of Representatives ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Patient Protection ◽  
The Future ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Child Health Insurance

AbstractThe election of Donald Trump, coupled with the retention of Republican majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate, raises questions about future of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the structure and funding of the country’s public health insurance programs – Medicare, Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program – and the direction of health policy in the United States, more generally. Political scientists are not renowned for their capacity to predict the future and many of those who forecast election results have received criticism in recent weeks for failing to predict the Trump victory. While the future is uncertain, it is possible for social scientists to offer a ‘conditional causal analysis’ about the future. This essay is an effort to think about the likely shape of American health care between now and the next US presidential election.

Financing Health Care in the Viceroyalty of Peru: The Hospitals of Lima in the Late Colonial Period

1995 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-154 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Cahill
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care Systems ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
Care Systems ◽  
Adequate Provision ◽  
To Come

Perceptions of provision for health care in colonial Spanish America are invariably influenced by commonplaces familiar from the comparative history of pre-modern medicine. There is a danger that the reproduction of facile a priori judgements–such as lack of adequate provision, institutional underfunding, deficient nutrition, insanitary conditions, concomitant high mortality rates, and “Dickensian” institutions functioning as workhouses and death-traps for the poor–will distort our understanding of Spanish American health-care systems, such clichés being all too often simplistic, anachronistic, or culturally purblind. Moreover, the whole system, such as it was, may at first sight appear to have depended largely upon the desultory charity of some religious orders and a few pious individuals, with the royal exchequer occasionally rescuing financially-straitened institutions from the brink of bankruptcy and foreclosure. Like most such formulations, there is enough truth to this simplistic scenario for it to be a plausible enough portrait of health care not only in colonial Spanish America but in early modern Spain itself; indeed, of any pre-modern system of health provision. Some of these pejorative impressions–e.g., lack of adequate provision, underfunding–are hardy perennials that even today retain their currency in the wealthiest of welfare states, and are writ especially large in Third World countries. Then as now, such strictures, well-founded or not, are but part of the picture, and overlook considerable institutional achievements in making the best of available resources. Much of this criticism is of course susceptible to quantitative analysis, though statistical data on colonial health care are difficult to come by. As in so many spheres of colonial Spanish America, such figures as are available cluster in the second half of the eighteenth century, a product of the insatiable appetite of Bourbon ministers and bureaucrats for a quantitative dimension to policy-making.

scholarly journals Tracing the Evolution of American Health Care through Medicare

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-89
Author(s):  
Craig Boyd Garner ◽  
Judith M. Berry ◽  
David A. McCabe
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
American Health Care System ◽  
The World ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
To Come ◽  
System Today ◽  
Care System

With President Obama’s health care reform currently under intense partisan scrutiny in the United States, this article is an objective resource for understanding the ways in which Medicare has historically served as a weather vane for charting the changes to the American health care system. During its nearly fifty-year tenure as the standard for the provision of medical care in the U.S., Medicare has evolved in fits and spurts, with its core structure shifting over time as the result of each decade’s economic and political climate. It is only by understanding these past revisions, both independently and in the context of the concurrent changes in other nations around the world, that we can fully comprehend the state of America’s health care system today, and make the necessary allowances to ensure that the nation’s health care will survive to provide for its constituents in the years to come.

Emerging Parallels in the American Health Care and Legal-Judicial Systems

1992 ◽  
Vol 18 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 73-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
David C. Hadorn
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Care System ◽  
Due Process ◽  
Health Care Rationing ◽  
Health Care Needs ◽  
Care Needs ◽  
American Health Care System ◽  
American Health Care ◽  
Principal Decision Making ◽  
Care System

The structure and principal decision-making processes of the American health care system have, in recent years, evolved to closely resemble those of the legal-judicial system. This transformation reflects important common values that underlie both systems, including the values of life and liberty. This Article analyzes quasi-legal features of the health care system and draws conclusions about how those features might be used to address the problem of health care rationing. It concludes that coverage rules, if properly developed, can provide the sort of objective framework necessary to evaluate claims of health care needs. This Article also demonstrates that by defining legitimate health care needs, society can thereby potentially eliminate or forestall the need to ration necessary care. This can be achieved by using carefully developed coverage rules, rather than the informal rules currently in place, in conjunction with already existing due process methods for interpreting and implementing those rules.

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