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Although the United States spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, more than 46 million people have no insurance coverage, while one in four Americans report difficulty paying for medical care. Indeed, the U.S. health care system, despite being the most expensive health care system in the world, ranked thirty-seventh in a comprehensive World Health Organization report. With health care spending only expected to increase, Americans are again debating new ideas for expanding coverage and cutting costs. According to the historian Paul V. Dutton, Americans should look to France, whose health care system captured the World Health Organization's number-one spot. InDifferential Diagnoses, Dutton debunks a common misconception among Americans that European health care systems are essentially similar to each other and vastly different from U.S. health care. In fact, the Americans and the French both distrust \"socialized medicine.\" Both peoples cherish patient choice, independent physicians, medical practice freedoms, and private insurers in a qualitatively different way than the Canadians, the British, and many others. The United States and France have struggled with the same ideals of liberty and equality, but one country followed a path that led to universal health insurance; the other embraced private insurers and has only guaranteed coverage for the elderly and the very poor. How has France reconciled the competing ideals of individual liberty and social equality to assure universal coverage while protecting patient and practitioner freedoms? What can Americans learn from the French experience, and what can the French learn from the U.S. example?Differential Diagnosesanswers these questions by comparing how employers, labor unions, insurers, political groups, the state, and medical professionals have shaped their nations' health care systems from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day.

From South Africa in the nineteenth century to Hong Kong today, nations around the world, including the United States, have turned to guestworker programs to manage migration. These temporary labor recruitment systems represented a state-brokered compromise between employers who wanted foreign workers and those who feared rising numbers of immigrants. Unlike immigrants, guestworkers couldn't settle, bring their families, or become citizens, and they had few rights. Indeed, instead of creating a manageable form of migration, guestworker programs created an especially vulnerable class of labor. Based on a vast array of sources from U.S., Jamaican, and English archives, as well as interviews,No Man's Landtells the history of the American \"H2\" program, the world's second oldest guestworker program. Since World War II, the H2 program has brought hundreds of thousands of mostly Jamaican men to the United States to do some of the nation's dirtiest and most dangerous farmwork for some of its biggest and most powerful agricultural corporations, companies that had the power to import and deport workers from abroad. Jamaican guestworkers occupied a no man's land between nations, protected neither by their home government nor by the United States. The workers complained, went on strike, and sued their employers in class action lawsuits, but their protests had little impact because they could be repatriated and replaced in a matter of hours. No Man's Landputs Jamaican guestworkers' experiences in the context of the global history of this fast-growing and perilous form of labor migration.

  While a number of serious safety problems with devices have emerged--the Dalkon Shield [4], the Bjork-Shiley heart valve [5], and the Sprint Fidelis defibrillator lead [6], to name a few--problems with effectiveness are not as readily apparent once a device is on the market, in part because postmarket efficacy trials of approved devices are rare. [...]the burden of ensuring device effectiveness is heavily weighted toward premarket evaluation. The cases are intended only to be illustrative and do not represent a random subset of FDA device approvals. [...]as is true for drugs, larger companies often acquire startups that produce promising devices. [...]the FDA's mission is to protect the public health, and allowing questionably effective products onto the market seems inconsistent with that mission.

How have Americans grappled with the moral and financial issues of veterans' health care? In the World War I era, veterans fought for a unique right: access to government-sponsored health care. In the process, they built a pillar of American social policy. Burdens of War explores how the establishment of the veterans' health system marked a reimagining of modern veterans' benefits and signaled a pathbreaking validation of the power of professionalized institutional medical care. Adler reveals that a veterans' health system came about incrementally, amid skepticism from legislators, doctors, and army officials concerned about the burden of long-term obligations, monetary or otherwise, to ex-service members. She shows how veterans' welfare shifted from centering on pension and domicile care programs rooted in the nineteenth century to direct access to health services. She also traces the way that fluctuating ideals about hospitals and medical care influenced policy at the dusk of the Progressive Era; how race, class, and gender affected the health-related experiences of soldiers, veterans, and caregivers; and how interest groups capitalized on a tense political and social climate to bring about change. The book moves from the 1910s—when service members requested better treatment, Congress approved new facilities and increased funding, and elected officials expressed misgivings about who should have access to care—to the 1930s, when the economic crash prompted veterans to increasingly turn to hospitals for support while bureaucrats, politicians, and doctors attempted to rein in the system. By the eve of World War II, the roots of what would become the country's largest integrated health care system were firmly planted and primed for growth. Drawing readers into a critical debate about the level of responsibility America bears for wounded service members, Burdens of War is a unique and moving case study.

Why, alone among industrial democracies, does the United States not have national health insurance? While many books have addressed this question, Dead on Arrival is the first to do so based on original archival research for the full sweep of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of political, reform, business, and labor records, Colin Gordon traces a complex and interwoven story of political failure and private response. He examines, in turn, the emergence of private, work-based benefits; the uniquely American pursuit of social insurance; the influence of race and gender on the health care debate; and the ongoing confrontation between reformers and powerful economic and health interests.Dead on Arrival stands alone in accounting for the failure of national or universal health policy from the early twentieth century to the present. As importantly, it also suggests how various interests (doctors, hospitals, patients, workers, employers, labor unions, medical reformers, and political parties) confronted the question of health care - as a private responsibility, as a job-based benefit, as a political obligation, and as a fundamental right.Using health care as a window onto the logic of American politics and American social provision, Gordon both deepens and informs the contemporary debate. Fluidly written and deftly argued, Dead on Arrival is thus not only a compelling history of the health care quandary but a fascinating exploration of the country's political economy and political culture through the American century, of the role of private interests and private benefits in the shaping of social policy, and, ultimately, of the ways the American welfare state empowers but also imprisons its citizens.

The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century. Most scholars regard Britain's industrial relations institutions as the product of a largely laissez faire system of labor relations, punctuated by occasional government interference. Howell, on the other hand, argues that the British state was the prime architect of three distinct systems of industrial relations established in the course of the twentieth century. The book contends that governments used a combination of administrative and judicial action, legislation, and a narrative of crisis to construct new forms of labor relations. Understanding the demise of the unions requires a reinterpretation of how these earlier systems were constructed, and the role of the British government in that process. Meticulously researched, Trade Unions and the State not only sheds new light on one of Thatcher's most significant achievements but also tells us a great deal about the role of the state in industrial relations.

01 02 The significance of international organisations as historical actors is one of the least researched aspects 20th century history. Daniel Maul's study of the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) during the core phase of decolonization (1940 to 1970) opens up new perspectives on the topic. Clearly presented, methodologically innovative and based on a wide range of sources, Maul explores makes clear the multifarious ways in which the ILO contributed to the debates which accompanied the dissolution of the European colonial empires and the processes of post-colonial nation-building that followed, both as a political hub and a forum for debate and as an independent actor. Maul takes an innovative look at the history of decolonization, post-colonial nation-building and the enduringly relevant international human rights and development discourses that these processes spawned. 02 02 An innovative diplomatic and intellectual history of decolonization, post-colonial nation building and international human rights and development discourses, this study of the role of the ILO during 1940–70 opens up new perspectives on the significance of international organisations as actors in the history of the 20th century. 19 02 One of the first books to explore the role of an international organization's secretariats in world politics on an empirical basis Contextualizes the history of the ILO within global debates Opens up new perspectives on the history of decolonization, Important new insights into the development of human rights discourses 13 02 DANIEL ROGER MAUL Lecturer in the Department of History, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Germany, and has published widely on the history of globalization and international organizations. He is currently working on a history of international relief in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. 08 02 'Abreak-through in historical scholarship on international politics in the twentieth century in general and on the role of international organizations, human rights and development in particular. It is immensely gratifying to see this excellent book appear in English translation, which makes it available to the large international audience it deserves. A carefully crafted, well-written study, the book will become a standard work for scholars and students in history, political science, human rights and development studies.' - Corinna R. Unger, Jacobs University Bremen, Germany 'This excellent book offers fresh insights into the complex field of international social policy. After difficult beginnings the International Labour Organization became 'a world en miniature', within which a new state order with new nations and new ideas, hopes, and claims for freedom and human rights emerged in the decades after World War II. The ILO shaped the process of decolonization in manifold ways and, as Daniel Maul shows on the basis of much new evidence, helped to establish a discourse of global responsibility.' -Andreas Eckert, Humboldt Universität Berlin, Germany 'This is a rich history for scholars of human rights, international organizations, and development, tightly focused on the ILO but not trapped in the halls of its secretariat.' - Roland Burke, La Trobe University, American Historical Review 04 02 List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Abbreviations Timeline Introduction PART I: 'A PEOPLE'S PEACE IN THE COLONIES', 1940–47 'The promise of a new earth to till': The ILO's Colonial Work in Exile, 1940–43 A Charter for the Colonies: The Colonies at the Philadelphia Conference, 1944 A New World With New Ideas: The ILO and the Quest for a Colonial Post-war Order, 1945–48 PART II: THE TOOLS OF PROGRESS: THE ILO, 1948–60 Principled Development: The Beginnings of the Technical Assistance Programme (TAP) At Arm's Length: The ILO and Late Colonial Social Policy Universal Rights? Standard-setting Against the Backdrop of Late Colonialism, Decolonization and the Cold War PART III: A GROWING CONFLICT: DEVELOPMENT, HUMAN RIGHTS AND DECOLONIZATION, 1960–70 A New Power: The ILO and the Growing Importance of the Developing World in the 1960s An Intellectual Fashion: Human Rights Standards as a Barrier to Development? Conclusion Appendix I: Selection of Important Conventions and Recommendations, 1930–70 Appendix II: Ratification of Core Human Rights Standards by Country and Date of Ratification (Selection) Sources and Bibliography Index 31 02 A history of the role of the ILO in the period of decolonization and post-colonial nation building and its contribution to international human rights and development discourses

Objectives. One of the major policy concerns at the federal and state level is the rising number of individuals without health insurance. The purpose of this article is to investigate whether party control of government and various state reforms impact the percentage of the state population without health insurance. Methods. Using data from 1987—2007, I empirically examine whether party control and five state policy reforms reduce the uninsured population. Results. The results show that Republicans are more effective than Democrats at the state level at reducing insurance gaps and that three of five policy reforms explored appear to significantly expand insurance coverage. Conclusions. The results provide valuable insight into which components of health-care reform at the national level may help address the health insurance problem.

The financial crisis of 2008 made Americans keenly aware of the impact Wall Street has on the economic well-being of the nation and its citizenry. Ott shows how the government, corporations, and financial institutions transformed stock investment from an elite to a mass practice at the beginning of the twentieth century.