Inequality in the Public Provision of Education: Why It Matters

2005 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 297-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald B. Holsinger
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Jessica Flanigan

Though rights of self-medication needn’t change medical decision-making for most patients, rights of self-medication have the potential to transform other aspects of healthcare as it is currently practiced. For example, if public officials respected patient’s authority to make medical decisions without authorization from a regulator or a physician, then they should also respect patient’s authority to choose to use unauthorized medical devices and medical providers. And many of the same reasons in favor of rights of self-medication and against prohibitive regulations are also reasons to support patient’s rights to access information about pharmaceuticals, including pharmaceutical advertisements. Rights of self-medication may also call for revisions to existing standards of product liability and prompt officials to rethink justifications for the public provision of healthcare.


Author(s):  
Pablo A. González ◽  
Laura L. Gutiérrez ◽  
Juan Carlos Oyanedel ◽  
Héctor Sánchez-Rodríguez

This article presents an exploratory model to classify public attitudes towards health systems financing and organization. It comprises 5 factors (pay-as-you-use, solidarity, willingness to contribute, mixed financing, and public provision) measured by 17 indicators, selected through Exploratory Structural Equation Modeling (ESEM) applied to a sample of Chilean adults. Based on this model, cluster analysis proposed 2 groups: “Taxes-public” and “Insurance-choice,” representing 47% and 53% of interviewees, respectively. The results show differences between groups concerning the evaluation of both health care providers and insurers. The second cluster tends to evaluate them more harshly, showing less willingness to contribute further, less solidarity, more agreement with the current financing arrangement in terms of the mixture and its insurance (as opposed to purchasing of service based on health problems), and more support for choice of provider. These results highlight the need to consider people’s attitudes in the public discussion of health systems financing.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Meghan Joy

This dissertation examines the claim that Age Friendly Cities (AFCs) represents an effective and revolutionary policy approach to population aging. The AFC approach is a placebased policy program intended to enhance the ‘fit’ between senior citizens and their environment. Mainstream accounts of AFCs claim that the program represents a paradigmatic shift in the way we think about aging, to move away from an individual health deficit approach to one that seeks to improve local environments by empowering seniors and local policy actors. However, initial critical literature notes that while AFCs may offer the potential to expand social and physical infrastructure investments to accommodate diverse population needs, they are being popularized in a conjuncture where the public sector is being restructured through narrow projects of neoliberalism that call for limiting public redistribution. This literature calls for further empirical studies to better understand the gap between AFC claims and practice. I heed this call through a qualitative case study of AFCs in the City of Toronto; a particularly relevant case because the recent Toronto Seniors Strategy has been critiqued for being more symbolic than substantive. My research represents a critical policy study as I understand AFCs not as a technical policy tool but as a political object attractive to conflicting progressive and neoliberal projects that use rhetorical and practical strategies to ensure their actualization. My approach is normative as I seek to provide insight for a transformative ‘right to the city’ for senior citizens through the AFC approach. I use literature on citizenship to understand the multiplicity of political projects that seek to expand or narrow the relations between people, environments and institutions through the AFC program. This understanding is based on the meanings 82 different policy actors from local government, the non-profit sector, academia, and other levels of government make of their everyday work in creating age-friendly environments. The broad question I ask is: How do local policy actors understand the rhetoric and practice of AFCs in Toronto and how do these understandings illustrate particular expansive and narrow political projects that affect the development of a right to the city for senior citizens through this policy program? I begin with an initial Case Chapter that scopes age friendly policy work in Toronto from a ‘seeing like a city’ perspective that identifies the complex multi-scalar and multi-actor nature of this policy domain. The Recognizing Seniors and Role of Place Chapters then examine AFCs rhetorically with respect to how local policy actors understand the ‘person’ and the ‘environment’. The Rescaling Redistribution and Restructuring Governance Chapters explore the practice of AFCs, including how local policy actors understand their capacities to design and deliver age-friendly services and amenities and the institutional mechanisms at their disposal to action AFCs. My findings challenge the claim that the AFC policy approach is effective, let alone revolutionary. I learn from policy actors that narrow projects of restructuring work to assemble seemingly progressive rhetoric and practice around active aging and localism to reduce universal public provision, expand the role of private citizens and their families to provide care, and use local policy actors as residual providers of last resort. My research documents how more expansive understandings of senior citizens as rights bearers and the role of the public and non-profit sector to recognize and redistribute on this basis are also in operation. Understanding these political projects more deeply through the AFC policy program helps me to offer policy insight as to what is needed both rhetorically and practically to craft a more effective and revolutionary alternative AFC model based on a right to the city for senior citizens.


2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 992-1016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eileen McDonagh

Before the welfare state, people were protected from disabilities resulting from illness, old age, and other infirmities by care work provided within the family. When the state assumes responsibility for care-work tasks, in effect it assumes parental roles, thereby becoming a form offamilial governmentin which the public provision of goods and services is analogous to care work provided in the family. My research pushes back the origins of the state’s obligation to care for people to a preindustrial form of government, hereditary monarchies—what Max Weber termed patrimonialism. It explicates how monarchs were cast as the parents of the people, thereby constituting kingship as a care work regime that assigned to political rulers parental responsibility for the welfare of the people. Using historical and quantitative analysis, I establish that retaining the legitimacy of monarchies as the first form of familial government in the course of Western European democratizing makes it more credible to the public and to political elites to accept the welfare state as the second form of familial government. That, in turn, promotes a more robust public sector supportive of social provision. The results reformulate conceptions of the contemporary welfare state and its developmental legacies.


Author(s):  
Rafael Ziegler ◽  
Nadia von Jacobi

Economic space for social innovation is not bounded by markets. Further to the money-based exchange relations in markets, there is self and informal provision based on social norms such as reciprocity, community, public provision of entitlements and of public goods organized via political processes, and professional provision based on expert knowledge. Although these ideal-types blur in practice, they show the rich contours and collaborative pluralism of economic space. Fostering fair space for social innovation requires taking all these modes and their relations into account. Social innovations as messages signal to the public where a change in mode or a reconfiguration of modes is demanded. Fairness as a matter of taking the perspective of those marginalized and least advantaged, calls for evaluative scrutiny with respect to such messages: do social innovations empower beneficiaries to become agents; and do they consider their well-being as patients?


1868 ◽  
Vol 14 (65) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Griesinger

I have been frequently obliged to give expression to my views on asylums and their future organisation. These views are expressed in official documents and private letters, which have never been published. A few observations which I made cursorily at the Naturforscher-Versammlung, in Hanover (“Zeitschr. f. Psychiatrie, “XXII., p. 390), as an indication of my point of view, were much too briefly and aphoristically given not to be subject to misconception. I therefore propose to devote the following pages to a connected, though necessarily brief, explanation of what I believe to be necessary or advantageous in the immediate future arrangement of lunacy matters in Germany, and to indicate towards which side I lean in the undoubted crisis which the question of the public provision for the insane has now reached. I apprehend neither detriment nor danger in this crisis, which is merely the progress towards more complete organisation. To wish to ignore it would not improve the matter. The predetermined conclusion to see the only good and right possible in things as they now exist is a far greater hindrance to the discovery of truth. If science can present new points of view, if urgent wants are brought to light, which cannot be satisfied by the present means of publicly providing for the insane, the requirements must not, in such circumstances, be ignored or denied, but the means must be made to suit the necessities. It was in this way that things were treated when the present asylums were founded; and is it possible that at the present time no further advance can be made ? It is, however, to be remarked, as was said a few years ago by Damerow, who was for the most part an authority with the opponents of reform (“Zeit-schr. f. Psychiatrie, “XIX., 1862, p. 187), “There is nothing further to be obtained in the future with the present public institutions for the cure and care of the insane.”


BMJ Open ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (5) ◽  
pp. e027187
Author(s):  
Peter Brückmann ◽  
Ashfa Hashmi ◽  
Marina Kuch ◽  
Jana Kuhnt ◽  
Ida Monfared ◽  
...  

ObjectivesPakistan is one out of five countries where together half of the global neonatal deaths occur. As the provision of services and facilities is one of the key elements vital to reducing this rate as well as the maternal mortality rate, this study investigates the status of the delivery of essential obstetric care provided by the public health sector in two districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in 2015 aiming to highlight areas where critical improvements are needed.SettingWe analysed data from a survey of 22 primary and secondary healthcare facilities as well as 85 community midwives (CMWs) in Haripur and Nowshera districts.ParticipantsUsing a structured questionnaire we evaluated the performance of emergency obstetric care (EmOC) signal functions and patient statistics in public health facilities. Also, 102 CMWs were interviewed about working hours, basic and specialised delivery service provision, referral system and patient statistics.Primary outcome measuresWe investigate the public provision of emergency obstetric care using seven key medical services identified by the United Nations (UN).ResultsDeliveries by public health cadres account for about 30% of the total number of births in these districts. According to the UN benchmark, only a small fraction of basic EmOC (2/18) and half of the comprehensive EmOC (2/4) facilities of the recommended minimum number were available to the population in both districts. Only a minority of health facilities and CMWs carry out several signal functions. Only 8% of the total births in one of the study districts are performed in public EmOC health facilities.ConclusionsBoth districts show a significant shortage of available public EmOC service provisions. Development priorities need to be realigned to improve the availability, accessibility and quality of EmOC service provisions by the public health sector alongside with existing activities to increase institutional births.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARTA CORDINI ◽  
COSTANZO RANCI

AbstractThe sizeable presence of migrant care workers in the private care market in many European countries is confirmed by several studies that have explained the phenomenon through functional arguments, stressing the economic convenience of transnational markets and the crucial role played by public regulation. This paper focuses instead on the public and institutional discourses that have contributed to legitimising this private care market, characterised by the worsening of employment conditions and the decrease in care quality. The main argument of this paper is that the social recognition of these workers provides the public with the new concepts and rationales that determine the actual shape of the private care market.Migrant care workers are usually, compared to other migrant workers, more welcome in the host society and less targeted by xenophobic attitudes, especially where their labour helps to meet a lack of public provision as is happening in Southern European countries. Nevertheless, their rights are not fully granted either as citizens or as workers: basic requirements in this migrant care market include for instance reduced wages, great flexibility, and informal contracts.Our hypothesis is tested through the reconstruction of the public regulation and a content analysis of the public discourse that has accompanied this regulation for ten years (2002–2012) in Italy. The two main national newspapers have been taken into account. This analysis provides evidence on how market dynamics have been shaped by a deliberate political construction, which has relieved governments of the task of finding a public solution to care needs and has relegated migrant care workers to a subordinate social position, which is functional in making the care market work.


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