United Health Care Insurance

Why, in the recent campaigns for universal health care, did organized labor maintain its support of employer-mandated insurance? Did labor's weakened condition prevent it from endorsing national health insurance? Marie Gottschalk demonstrates here that thc unions' surprising stance was a consequence of the peculiarly private nature of social policy in the United States. Her book combines a much-needed account of labor's important role in determining health care policy with a bold and incisive analysis of the American welfare state. Gottschalk stresses that, in the United States, the social welfare system is anchored in thc private sector but backed by government policy. As a result, the private sector is a key political battlefield where business, labor, the state, and employees hotly contest matters such as health care. She maintains that the shadow welfare state of job-based benefits shaped the manner in which labor defined its policy interests and strategies. As evidence. Gottschalk examines the influence of the Taft-Hartley health and welfare funds, thc Employee Retirement Income Security Act (E.R.I.S.A.), and experience-rated health insurance, showing how they constrained labor from supporting universal health care.

Health care policy and proposals for national health care reform have become some of the most contentious political issues of the decade. Garland Publishing announces a new series addressing the most significant issues in the area of health care policy and the business of health care in the United States. books in this multidisciplinary series will include studies of health care practice, the health care business, the implications of multicultural perspectives on health care for public policy, the impact of insurance on health care, and debates over national health care policy, including health care reform. This collection of timely works will offer significant scholarly perspectives on one of the most important issues in public policy. An unfulfilled promise This book examines why educational investments by African American women, the group in American society that is most susceptible to being poor, have not reduced poverty as expected. In the United States, public policies rely heavily on education as the powerful mechanism by which economic opportunity will be provided. However, although African American women followed the prescription set forth by human capital theory and increased their educational attainment from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, the promised payoffs to additional schooling did not materialize. An important indirect effect The analysis in this study reveals that the ability of human capital investment to alleviate poverty for African American women differs depending on whether one estimates private or social returns. In the individual-level analysis, education is a strong negative determinant of poverty and is equally sensitive for each time periodstudied. Education is also a critical mediating variable between family of origin, teen birth, and poverty, suggesting its important indirect effect on women's later economic prosperity.