Presented By: Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy
Beyond Obamacare: Life, Death, and Social Policy
James House
This event is free and open to the public with a reception to follow.
This event will be live webstreamed.
About the book:
Health care spending in the United States today is approaching 20 percent of GDP, yet levels of U.S. population health have been declining for decades relative to other wealthy—and even some developing—nations. How is it possible that the United States, which spends more than any other nation on health care and insurance, now has a population markedly less healthy than those of many other nations? Sociologist and public health expert James S. House analyzes this paradoxical crisis, offering surprising new explanations for how and why the United States has fallen into this trap. In Beyond Obamacare, House shows that health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, cannot resolve this crisis because they do not focus on the underlying causes for the nation’s poor health outcomes, which are largely social, economic, environmental, psychological, and behavioral.
House demonstrates that the problems of our broken health care and insurance system are interconnected with our large and growing social disparities in education, income, and other conditions of life and work. House calls for a complete reorientation of how we think about health. He concludes that we need to move away from our misguided and almost exclusive focus on biomedical determinants of health, and to place more emphasis on addressing social, economic,and other inequalities.
For more information on Beyond Obamacare, visit the publisher's website.
From the author's bio:
James S. House is the Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Survey Research, Public Policy and Sociology. His primary appointment is in the Survey Research Center, the Institute for Social Research, with a joint retention appointment in Sociology in addition to his primary academic appointment in Public Policy. His research has focused on the role of social and psychological factors in the etiology and course of health and illness, including the role of psychosocial factors in understanding and alleviating social disparities in health and the way health changes with age. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. At the Ford School he teaches courses in socioeconomic policy and health policy. In the last decade, Jim co-edited Making Americans Healthier: Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy (2008, with Bob Schoeni of the Ford School and others) and A Telescope on Society: Survey Research & Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (2004, with others). He received his BA in History from Haverford college, his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan, and taught at Duke University before joining University of Michigan faculty in 1978 and the Ford School in January 2008.
This event is made possible through the generous support of the Gilbert S. Omenn and Martha A. Darling Health Policy Fund.
For more information go to: http://fordschool.umich.edu/events/2015/beyond-obamacare-life-death-and-social-policy
This event will be live webstreamed.
About the book:
Health care spending in the United States today is approaching 20 percent of GDP, yet levels of U.S. population health have been declining for decades relative to other wealthy—and even some developing—nations. How is it possible that the United States, which spends more than any other nation on health care and insurance, now has a population markedly less healthy than those of many other nations? Sociologist and public health expert James S. House analyzes this paradoxical crisis, offering surprising new explanations for how and why the United States has fallen into this trap. In Beyond Obamacare, House shows that health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, cannot resolve this crisis because they do not focus on the underlying causes for the nation’s poor health outcomes, which are largely social, economic, environmental, psychological, and behavioral.
House demonstrates that the problems of our broken health care and insurance system are interconnected with our large and growing social disparities in education, income, and other conditions of life and work. House calls for a complete reorientation of how we think about health. He concludes that we need to move away from our misguided and almost exclusive focus on biomedical determinants of health, and to place more emphasis on addressing social, economic,and other inequalities.
For more information on Beyond Obamacare, visit the publisher's website.
From the author's bio:
James S. House is the Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Survey Research, Public Policy and Sociology. His primary appointment is in the Survey Research Center, the Institute for Social Research, with a joint retention appointment in Sociology in addition to his primary academic appointment in Public Policy. His research has focused on the role of social and psychological factors in the etiology and course of health and illness, including the role of psychosocial factors in understanding and alleviating social disparities in health and the way health changes with age. He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences. At the Ford School he teaches courses in socioeconomic policy and health policy. In the last decade, Jim co-edited Making Americans Healthier: Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy (2008, with Bob Schoeni of the Ford School and others) and A Telescope on Society: Survey Research & Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond (2004, with others). He received his BA in History from Haverford college, his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan, and taught at Duke University before joining University of Michigan faculty in 1978 and the Ford School in January 2008.
This event is made possible through the generous support of the Gilbert S. Omenn and Martha A. Darling Health Policy Fund.
For more information go to: http://fordschool.umich.edu/events/2015/beyond-obamacare-life-death-and-social-policy
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