The New York Academy of Medicine's Section on the History of Medicine and Public Health, with the support of the New York Council for the Humanities, presents: With Coverage for All?: Health and the State in Twentieth Century America, a series of four public lectures on the contentious history of efforts to guarantee health care coverage to all Americans. Explaining this history takes scholars to the heart of American culture, exploring such long-standing structural factors as the country’s comparatively weak labor movement and the political strength of both its medical profession and commercial health providers and insurance companies, and the ongoing conflicts between national ideals the health care debates always prompt, such as the question of how to balance America’s faith in self-reliance and economic laissez-faire with its definitional commitment to economic justice and opportunity.
This lecture series brings together four eminent scholars — authors of dozens of books, journal articles and other studies on the history and economics of health care in the United States. Three historians of medicine will present case studies from the twentieth century, and an eminent health economist will take the long view with his analysis of the roles American presidents have played in the health care debates.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Insurance or Rights? Debates over Health Coverage and Access to Health Care in the U.S., 1912-1950 Beatrix Hoffman, Ph.D.
Is health care a right? Although the U.S. has not resolved this question, Americans have debated it for nearly a century. This talk will discuss the origins of the idea of a right to health care, and the ways in which ideas about rights (for or against) have been put into practice in the U.S. health care system, with particular attention to debates over universal coverage.
Beatrix Hoffman is a historian at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of The Wages of Sickness: the Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America. She is currently working on a history of the right to health care in the twentieth-century United States.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Industry vs. System: US Health Policy 1948-2009 Rosemary Stevens, Ph.D., M.P.H.
This talk will examine the history and implications of two major thrusts in government policy since 1948: first, the efforts to expand population coverage to selected groups, most notably through Medicare, Medicaid and child health programs, and on to current interest in those who remain uninsured; and second, partial, non-controversial investments in the health care infrastructure, notably through subsidy of biomedical research, buildings, and professional and specialized education.
Rosemary Stevens is the DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar in the Social Medicine and Public Policy Program of the Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medical College. She is the author of many books, including The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Policy. Her current research is on the invention of US federal veterans’ hospitals and related services after World War I.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
What is Wrong with Medicaid?
Jonathan Engel, Ph.D.
Professor Engel will address the shifting focus of the Medicaid program through the years from poverty acute care to middle-class long-term care, and discuss where it is falling short of achieving its original objectives, and why this is happening. Moreover, the talk will address the way in which the current healthcare debate in Congress dovetails with the long-term decline of Medicaid as a competitive insurance program.
Jonathan Engel is a historian at Baruch College He is the author of several books on the history of medicine and health, including Poor People’s Medicine: Medicaid and American Charity Care since 1965.
Currently, he is working on history of the US health system since 1970.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Presidents and the Never-Ending Quest for Health Reform Rashi Fein, Ph.D.
Our series will conclude with Rashi Fein’s assessment of how America’s presidents have defined America's health "problem" and the different "solutions" they have proposed. He will examine the factors that helped lead to success and failure in Presidential efforts to extend health insurance, paying special attention to the role of individuals and ideology as well as the limits and strengths of presidential power.
Rashi Fein is Professor of Medical Economics, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. Among his many books are Medical Care, Medical Costs:
The Search for a Health Insurance Policy, and The Health Care Mess; How We Got Into It and What It Will Take To Get Out (which he co-wrote with US Surgeon General Julius Richmond). He is currently working on a book narrating some of his experiences in the efforts to implement and improve health-care policies.
This series received funding from the New York Council for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this lecture series do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
More information about the Spring, 2010 lectures will be posted shortly, but the line-up includes Steven Peitzman, M. Susan Lindee, Jacqueline Duffin, and Wiliam Ashworth.
(h/t H-SCI-MED-TECH)
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