Talk:Health care reform
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This entire series of articles on health care reform appears to be a series of advocacy papers written from a left-liberal perspective. In particular, the articles about health care reform between the teens and forties, health care reform under Truman, health care reform under Nixon, health care reform under Carter, and health care reform under Clinton are all written from a point of view that clearly favors some sort of national single-payer or modified single-payer system. The author considers setbacks for increased state control of health care "unfortunate" at nearly every juncture.
While they contain valuable historical information, they need to be edited to conform to the NPOV policy. The coverage itself also violates the spirit of the NPOV policy: presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush also proposed major health care system reforms which would emphasize market mechanisms and individual responsibility. They are currently are not covered at all. I have tagged all of them with a NPOV and quality tags. Since it seems clear that one person wrote all these articles--I'm including notes on all the talk pages to discuss the issues here.
Elirl
Anyone who read the history for these pages would quickly see they were not at all written by a single author. This material was posted by members in my Politics of Health Care class taught at Duke University. They use a common template in terms of how the information is "packaged" so that it's relatively to look across these "case studies" and see a common set of questions being addressed. Our focus in class was universal coverage proposals and the "puzzle" we were addressing is why such initiatives repeatedly have been defeated over nearly 100 years of effort given that public opinion polls repeatedly show overwhelming support for the idea of universal coverage. We did not have time in class to look at every administration or every set of proposals that has ever been advanced. Those wishing to post "case studies" of health reform efforts by Bush 41 or Bush 43 are more than welcome to do so.
FWIW, I am very far from being an advocate of single payer: indeed, I presented (to rather considerable ridicule) a paper at the American Political Science Association convention last September a paper titled How the U.S. Achieved Universal Coverage under George W. Bush, outlining a very market-oriented approach to universal coverage entailing an individual mandate coupled with high-deductible consumer-directed health plans. This style of reform has been championed in books published by American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation and other market-oriented think tanks or writers, hardly champions of a single payer approach. I continue to believe that if we get universal coverage, it is far more likely to emerge through leadership from a Republican president using a platform that is market-oriented rather than single payer. Moreover, I think one could legitimately view the history of failed efforts to achieve universal coverage and make the case that it was the repeated dogmatic refusal of single payer advocates to compromise on their vision of what universal coverage should look like that has led us into the impasse we face even today.
Thus, if you detect bias in these cases, you can rest assured it was not encouraged by me. On the contrary, I repeatedly made clear that I expected these students fleshing out these cases to stick to reporting on the facts in each case: who did what, when, why and how, etc. as opposed to getting into philosophical discussions of the ethical merits of one approach to universal coverage versus another. I thought that sharing our collective class work on Wikipedia made far more sense than just creating these cases for our own use and thereafter consigned to the dustbin of academia. You may regard our focus on universal coverage as biased in and of itself, but as indicated above, it is the disconnect between repeated expressions of public opinion and our failure to address these that creates the puzzle. Were only 25% of the public in favor of universal coverage, there would be no puzzle to solve and not much interest in cases to help us better understand why this idea keeps failing.
Thus, if you believe there are certain expressions of bias within a given case, then the appropriate corrective is to simply make the requisite edit(s) as opposed to branding the entire page as being biased. I think any even-handed observer would conclude that 95% or more of the content is strictly factual. If occasional expressions of a less-than-neutral point of view crept in, it was not my intent; in the real world, neither my students nor the men's or women's basketball teams are perfect. That said, in my classes, 95% is A work. Armed with more perfect information than s/he may have had when applying the NPOV and quality tags to this work, I would encourage Elirl to consider their removal.
--Conoverc 16:51, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Lots of changes to this page needed...
The distinction between "health reform" and "health care reform" is very artificial. It would be best to combine the two into a more comprehensive article on both the political processes and the management practices surrounding planning for change in health systems. It should be an international account - the history of health reform in the US has rightly been moved to other pages. 85.210.43.69 01:24, 13 May 2006 (UTC)(stuartjcameron).
