A comparative analysis of mandated benefit laws, 1949-2002.
Individuals are likely to have more information about their potential need for care than insurers, so the latter have concerns that potential enrollees seeking coverage may be at greater than average risk. This information asymmetry creates incentives for insurers to offer less broad coverage than the public would want...

Laws requiring health plans to provide direct access to obstetricians and gynecologists, and use of cancer screening by women.
Reacting to patient and provider dissatisfaction with the restrictive practices of managed care plans during the 1990s, many states adopted managed care patient protection regulations designed to restrain these health plan activities (Blendon et al. 1998; Noble and Brennan 1999; Sloan and Hall 2002). Limited access to specialists was...

Hospitals' negotiating leverage with health plans: how and why has it changed?
Despite efforts to reduce hospital utilization and length of stay, hospital care continues to account for a substantial portion of total health care expenses (Levit et al. 2002; Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality 2000). In addition, spending on hospital care is on the rise once again. In 2000,...

Positive health: the human right to health care under the New York State Constitution.
I. INTRODUCTION In his first State of the State address, former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer recognized the urgent need to "reform our health care system." (1) He explained that "when 2.8 million New Yorkers can't afford health insurance, that affects not only them and their families,...

Do hospitals provide lower quality care on weekends?
The fact that patients admitted to the hospital on a weekend are more likely to die than patients admitted to the hospital on a weekday has stimulated renewed debate over the role of regulation versus incentives in enhancing the quality of health care. The apparent differences in weekend versus...

Collective bargaining by nurses in Canadian health care: assessing recent trends and emerging claims.
I. Introduction Since the late 1990s, health human resource (HHR) policy in Canadian health care has been a mixture of consensus and conflict. Consensus appears to have emerged about the broad policy goals for Canadian HHR planning: immediate recruitment and retention goals, and long-term goals of greater...

Medical dominance in a changing world: the UK case.
ABSTRACT This paper examines the governance of the medical profession in the U.K. As in many other countries, external and internal pressures have brought a shift in relations between the state and medicine. The context in which doctors practise has undergone radical change. In common with many...

Health services research as a source of legislative analysis and input: the role of the California Health Benefits Review Program.
The great significance of the growing role of experts in the democratic process is not, as is often feared, their ability to manipulate elected representatives and gain irresponsible control over the routine operations of public bureaucracies, but rather their ability to provide the intellectual underpinnings of public policy (Walker...

Do state parity laws reduce the financial burden on families of children with mental health care needs?
The intent of parity laws is to improve equity in private insurance coverage for mental health care. Health insurers have covered mental health care at a significantly lower level than coverage for other conditions for many years (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1982; Jensen et al. 1998; Buck et...

Disciplining the medical profession? Implications of patient choice for medical dominance.
ABSTRACT This paper deals with the dynamics of medical dominance and patient choice, primarily within the Britain, with reference to a range of other European countries too (including Germany, France and Greece) for comparative purposes. It will draw upon two concepts in particular: 'responsibilisation' and 'protoprofessionalism', the...