Committee on Health Politics.
Summer 1999 Newsletter
Greetings. Once again the Committee on Health Politics has three panels at the 1999 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association to be held in Atlanta September 2rd thru 5th, 1999. The schedule of our panels is attached. It is a good line up of papers and roundtables. We hope that all of you will be able to attend, if you are going to Atlanta.
There is a fourth COHP related panel chaired by Colleen Grogan
" Doing Better than Expected? The Politics of Health Care
Expansion in the 1990s."
However, this is a good news, bad news situation. The good news
is the presence on the program of another fine health policy panel.
The bad news is that it has been scheduled by APSA at the same
time our Medicare panel is scheduled at 10:45 on Saturday morning.
We tried very hard to get them to change the time of our panel,
but were unsuccessful.
Lunch Meeting
COHP will also have the annual dutch treat Lunch Meeting, which will be held at Azio Downtown 222 Peachtree St. (between Harris and International Blvd). It is a short distance from the convention hotels.
It will be on Saturday September 5th. The lunch will start at 12:30 or shortly thereafter, as the morning panel runs to 12:30. We will probably order about 12:45 p.m. We urge everyone to attend and participate in the meeting.
Lunch Meeting Agenda
Bring your ideas for next year's panels to the lunch. We can expect to probably receive three, and perhaps four panels, for the 2000 APSA conference, which will be held in Washington. Remember that the number of panels we receive is based in part on the attendance at our previous year's panels. So the bigger our attendance this year, the better our opportunity for an additional panel next year.
Among the other items on this year's agenda for the lunch meeting is the future of the News and Notes section of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. David Warren, the current editor, is stepping down soon after nearly twenty-five years of service in this role, and has asked for suggestions by COHP members concerning the future of this part of the Journal. Should the News and Notes section be approached differently in this era of email and the World Wide Web?
David deserves our deep appreciation for his fine work on this part of the Journal since its inception.
As usual Mark Peterson will give us an update on developments at the Journal at our annual lunch.
COHP Web Site
Everyone reading this newsletter has a homework assignment. Ted Anagnoson has worked hard this year to develop new and vastly improved COHP website.
URL: http://www.silcom.com/~anag999/COHP.htm#Main Menu
Your assignment is to visit the site and email Ted or I with your impressions and suggestions. One of my year 2000 goals is to improve and expand the COHP website so it becomes even more useful for health policy scholars and students. Your suggestions will be helpful and much appreciated. One way to effectively grow the COHP website is to add more links to useful sites developed by members of COHP. If you have these types of suggestions let us know.
Attached to this newsletter is a report from Ted on the development of the website over the past several months. Ted will be touring the wilds of Alaska in early September, but I look forward to talking at lunch to those who have suggestions for the website.
The COHP website currently contains information about COHP, links to other health policy sites, a link to the JHPPL site, and syllabi. In addition to links are there other items of original material that might be usefully included on the COHP website.
Email list
My other major COHP project for Y2K is to have an email address for everyone on the COHP mailing. I think it is now very likely that everyone has such an address. If you are reading the paper version of this Newsletter, it means I do not have your current email address because I have sent the electronic version of the newsletter to those email addresses in my system. If I don't have your email address, Please send it to me so I can update my mailing list.
If you change your email address in the future, please send me the new one so I can keep an updated list and use it to distribute information. I now have my email system set up to efficiently send messages to everyone on the COHP list.
We hope to see many of you at the COHP panels and lunch in Atlanta. I hope everyone with ideas and suggestions about how COHP could be helpful to you, especially with the website, will email their thoughts.
Again my email address is: brasfijm@webster.edu
Report on the Committee on Health Politics Web Site
By Ted Anagnoson
1. We have a web site; it has been operating since November or
December, 1998. It is located at:
http://www.silcom.com/~anag999/COHP.htm
2. The site consists of a general page, a page of links, a
page for syllabi to be linked or posted, a page for joining the
organization that states you send an email to Jim Brasfield, pages
that list the
committee's papers presented at the last 4-5 APSA meetings, a
link to the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law, and a
page of links for health policy people -- the links page has a
special section for beginners aimed at students.
3. My ISP, Silicon Beach Communications, provides me with a daily report on the number of hits for up to 3 web sites. From those reports, we get a small but steady number of hits on the main page each day, anywhere from 1 to perhaps 5-6. The median is probably 2-3.
4. We are linked with the American Political Science Association, the Political site of the day, and the top 10 or so web indexing services like Excite, Alta Vista, and the like.
5. The major thing we could think about at this point is getting
our own domain name, like www.healthpolitics.org or something
like that. We are currently listed off my own web site, although
I personally use my university site (anag999@silcom.com is my
personal email account). The problem we run into if we do this,
however, is that:
a. it costs money; we would have to come up with somewhere between
$50 and $250 per year.
b. we would have to put a link from my page to the new site, which
would be OK, but you always lose
users when you do that.
c. perhaps other things I have not thought of.
Personally, I think the current site is OK. My goal in doing this
was just to have a place for professionals to find us if they
wanted to through search engines or through the APSA, do a little
advertising for what we do, and have some links for students.
I think we have those things....but if someone wanted to do much
more, they are welcome to join in.
Ted Anagnoson (currently (9/2-9/99) between Ketchikan and Juneau,
Alaska), Political Science Department
Committee on Health Politics
Panels Offered at the
1999 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting
Panel 1 Health Policy: A Comparative Perspective
Friday September 3-- 8:45am
Chair: Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau
University of Texas, Houston
Papers:
"The Politics of Disease-Related Patients' Associations:
An Anglo-American Comparison"
Bruce Wood, University of Manchester
"Feedback Effects and Health Care Reform in New Zealand"
Miriam Laugesen, University of Melbourne
Discussant: Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau
University of Texas, Houston
Panel 3 Roundtable on Politics and Managed Care
Friday September 3-- 3:30pm
Chair: Thomas Oliver, Johns Hopkins University
Participants:
Thomas Oliver, Johns Hopkins University
Timothy Prinz, United Hospital Fund
Theodore Marmor, Yale University
Mark Peterson, University of California, Los Angeles
Jacob Hacker, New America Foundation
Joseph White, Tulane University
Panel 2 Roundtable on The Future of Medicare
Saturday September 4--10:45am
Chair: Jim Marone, Brown University
Participants:
Jim Marone, Brown University
Theodore Marmor Yale University
Carolyn Tuohy, University of Toronto
Richard Saltman, Emory University
Open Lunch Business Meeting for all members of COHP -
Saturday September 4, 1999 12:30pm
Azio Downtown 222 Peachtree St. (between Harris and International
Blvd.)