Suchergebnisse

A letter report issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "Over 25 million children have health insurance coverage through Medicaid or the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). Coverage alone, however, does not guarantee that services will be available or that children will receive needed care. GAO was asked to evaluate states' efforts to facilitate and monitor access to primary and preventive services for children in these jointly funded federal-state programs. The study surveyed 16 states, covering over 65 percent of the Medicaid and SCHIP population. GAO analyzed requirements relevant to managed care and fee-for-service (FFS) delivery systems, including the number and location of physicians and their availability to see beneficiaries, monitoring of health plan or physician compliance with these requirements, and collection and analysis of beneficiary service utilization data."

Norway constitutes the western part of the Scandinavian peninsula with a population of 4.5 million. The country does not grow tobacco, but has a tobacco industry with a long tradition. The standard of living is high; unemployment is low representing, in April-June 2002, about 4.0% of the labour force. Price levels and wages are relatively high. The population's health is fairly good, with life expectancy figures being one of the highest in the world. The health service and social security system are well developed. A democratic form of government and a separate judicial system ensure everyone freedom of expression, the right to vote, and protection under law. The welfare state is based on ideals of equality and justice, which are clearly stated in its legislation: everyone has the right to employment, an education, social security and health service.

Henriette Asséo,
Les Tsiganes dans les Balkans
Les Tsiganes forment l'une des principales minorités des Balkans, représentant jusqu'à 10 % de la population actuelle de la Roumanie. Cependant, leur très ancienne implantation est ignorée ou contestée. Depuis la fin des âges d'or impériaux et la montée des nationalismes basés sur «l'exclusivisme ethnique», ils sont même les victimes d'un violent ostracisme. La remise en cause actuelle des ordres nationaux — à l'Ouest par la formation de l'Europe, à l'Est par la fin des systèmes communistes et les modifications, quelquefois violentes des frontières —, relance la «question tsigane» comme un problème transnational. Pour la première fois de leur histoire, les Tsiganes sont, par le biais de leurs organisations, des acteurs politiques écoutés par les institutions européennes. Cette nouvelle stratégie de visibilité ne peut cependant empêcher un retour inquiétant aux arguments eugénistes de l'entre-deux-guerres.

Testimony issued by the General Accounting Office with an abstract that begins "With the aging of the veteran population, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is likely to see a significant increase in long-term care need. VA uses noninstitutional long-term care services, such as home health care and adult day health care, and institutional care to meet this need. GAO identified limits in veterans' access to six noninstitutional long-term care services and factors that contribute to these limitations in its report VA Long-Term Care: Service Gaps and Facility Restrictions Limit Veterans' Access to Noninstitutional Care (GAO-03-487, May 9, 2003). The report is based, in part, on a survey of all 139 VA facilities. Today's testimony discusses conclusions and highlights recommendations GAO made in the report to improve access to VA noninstitutional long-term care services."

SUMMARY:
Emil' Pain poses the problem of the relationship between liberal democracy and nationhood from a normative liberal perspective. The urgency of this analysis is determined by the fact that Russian post-Soviet reformers paid scant attention to importance of liberal nationalism as an aspect of transition to democracy. Still, issues of nationalities' policies, positive national self-identification of the Russian population and interethnic relations are in the forefront of public debates. The author devises a stipulate definition of empire, nation, and ethnicity, arguing that Russia's transition from empire to civic nationalism is far from complete and is still complicated by resurgent traditionalism. Pain focuses on the sequence of Yeltsin's and Putin's presidential terms and analyzes mobilization of ethnic minorities and the titular Russian nation as a result of political reforms, modernization, and migrations.

Summary: In the past suicidal behavior among Black South Africans has been largely underresearched. Earlier studies among the other main ethnic groups in the country showed suicidal behavior in those groups to be a serious problem. This article briefly reviews some of the more recent research on suicidal behavior in Black South Africans. The results indicate an apparent increase in suicidal behavior in this group. Several explanations are offered for the change in suicidal behavior in the reported clinical populations. This includes past difficulties for all South Africans to access health care facilities in the Apartheid (legal racial separation) era, and present difficulties of post-Apartheid transformation the South African society is undergoing, as the people struggle to come to terms with the deleterious effects of the former South African racial policies, related socio-cultural, socio-economic, and other pressures.

AbstractRecent catastrophes in environmental management, such as population collapses in oceanic fisheries, have led environmental activists and scholars to invoke the precautionary principle (PP). In its strong form, PP demands that no human-initiated change in an ecosystem be permitted unless it is certain it will do no harm; while, in its weak form, PP holds that if an action might be environmentally harmful, regulators may, on best evidence, limit human activities to avoid damaging ecosystem perturbations. Implementing PP, however, presents epistemological, logical and practical difficulties. This paper compares the function of PP to that of the Biblical Wisdom literature in encouraging ecological prudence, and argues that PP should be replaced by a series of guiding concepts, dealing with the limitations of ecological knowledge and the flaws in human character most likely to result in environmental disaster. The environmental cases analysed are from oceanic fisheries management.

L'aide humanitaire d'urgence est à un tournant de son histoire. Une réflexion a commencé au sein de nombreuses organisations non gouvernementales (ONG), afin de surmonter les contradictions et les dérives qui accompagnent leurs opérations sur les terrains de guerre : victimisation trompeuse de populations locales, détournement ou instrumentalisation de l'aide par des belligérants — ou des puissances extérieures. Par ailleurs, l'engagement humanitaire est souvent de plus en plus sélectif, voire discriminatoire, pour tenir compte non seulement des préférences politiques des gouvernements, qui jugent bon d'intervenir ici plutôt que là, mais aussi des préférences médiatiques, dont les effets sont pour le moins ambivalents. Enfin, nombre d'ONG se trouvent placées, sur le terrain, dans la position d'agents des diplomaties occidentales, entraînant parfois une utilisation abusive du « label » humanitaire. Cette réflexion, urgente, pourrait utilement déboucher sur une redéfinition du contenu politique, économique et éthique de l'intervention humanitaire.

The Australian system of mandatory detention of asylum–seekers has become increasingly controversial. Insofar as commentary on detention has been framed historically, critics have pointed to Australia's race–based exclusionary laws and policies over the twentieth century. In this article, we suggest that exclusion and detention are not equivalent practices, even if they are often related. Here we present an alternative genealogy of mandatory detention and protests against it. Quarantine–detention and the internment of "enemy aliens" in wartime are historic precedents for the current detention of asylum–seekers. Importantly, in both carceral practices, non–criminal and often non–citizen populations were held in custody en masse and without trial. Quarantine, internment and incarceration of asylum–seekers are substantively connected over the twentieth century, as questions of territory, security and citizenship have been played out in Australia's histories of detention.

The Euro illusion is a phenomenon related to the money illusion whereby people are biased toward the nominal representation of the Euro (the numbers printed on notes and coins) when evaluating prices in the new currency. In Study 1 the Euro illusion was demonstrated in telephone interviews of a Swedish population-based sample. However, no Euro illusion was found for British students in Study 2. An additional two studies employing student samples demonstrated the Euro illusion for fictitious unknown currencies in that prices of goods or services were evaluated as less expensive when the money unit was larger. An exception, however, was that prices were evaluated as more expensive when the money unit was very small (like the Italian Lira). Furthermore, the illusion was weaker or absent for low-price essential goods or services or for an induced negative attitude toward the currency change.

Abstract Income inequality has been increasing across the United States, but little is known about changing income inequality in nonmetropolitan counties. Data from the 1980 and 1990 Summary Tape Files of the U.S. Census of Population and Housing are used to estimate ordinary least squares models of change in income inequality. Household income inequality increased in a smaller share of nonmetro than metro counties from 1980 to 1990, and increases in income inequality were influenced more strongly by economic restructuring in nonmetro than in metro counties. Other factors, such as change in household structure, demographic composition, and labor supply and job quality, were generally similar in affecting income inequality in nonmetro and metro counties. The greater importance of economic restructuring in nonmetro counties indicates the lesser diversity and smaller size of local economies, and their greater vulnerability to forces of economic restructuring.

AbstractIn the selective contracting era, consumer choice has generally been absent in most state Medicaid programs,
including California's (called Medi‐Cal). In a setting where beneficiary exit is not a
threat, a large payer may have both the incentives and the ability to exercise undue market power, potentially
exposing an already vulnerable population to further harm. The analyses presented here of Medi‐Cal
contracting data, however, do not yield compelling evidence in favor of the undue market power hypothesis. Instead,
hospital competition appears to explain with greater consistency why certain hospitals choose to contract with
Medi‐Cal while others do not, the trends in inpatient prices paid by Medi‐Cal over time, and the
effect of price competition on service cutbacks, such as emergency room closures. © 2003 by the Association
for Public Policy Analysis and Management.

This article examines the income maintenance policies of several members of the European Union and three candidate countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. It addresses the issue of the effectiveness of these policies and especially means-tested safety nets in alleviating poverty. To assess the effectiveness of the policies, we use data from the Luxembourg Income Study. We analyse the incidence of poverty based on the EU poverty line and poverty reduction for the entire population and vulnerable groups - the unemployed, solo mothers, large families, and the elderly. During the 1990s the poverty rates increased in most countries and for most vulnerable groups. Means-tested benefits assumed growing importance in alleviating poverty, and several countries have improved their schemes to guarantee a minimum income. At the same time reforms have produced diversity in the safety nets across Europe.

To avoid the problems of overcrowding and urban unemployment that are associated with overurbanisation observed in other developing countries, China has, since the late 1970s, actively pursued a strategy of rural industrialisation by encouraging the development of rural industries which provide employment opportunities for the surplus labour in agriculture. In this paper, we examine the impact of rural industrialisation on migration using data from the 1990 China Population Census. We use robust estimation of logit models that not only captures the impact of rural industrialisation on migration propensity but also takes into account the nature of clustered data (individuals within provinces). In our estimates, rural industrialisation does not have a statistically significant impact on the probability of either intraprovincial or interprovincial migration. Thus the results cast some doubt about whether China can move on a unique path towards urbanisation.