Suchergebnisse

The National Health Statistics Group (NHSG) has managed to keep the national health accounts (NHA) apolitical and highly respected. NHSG strategies have included the careful acquisition and presentation of statistics relating to health costs and payers; the use of scholarly journals to disseminate ideas to other government offices and, beyond them, to industry, labor, the professions, and universities; and the promotion of cooperation with related U.S., statistical agencies, provider groups, contractors, and international organizations. Responding to an increasingly complex system of third-party payers in the U.S. health system and controversies over methods, the NHA has continually evolved to meet the demands of health care decisionmakers. Historically, these dialogues have forced health accountants to refine their methods to ensure that their portrayal of spending and financing trends presents information that can inform the decisionmaking process in a non-partisan way.

The mines of Southern and Central Africa can be seen as a congeries of microenvironments whose suitability for human habitation has been transformed as the result of capital investment as constrained by government policies. Mine managers sought improved living conditions to enhance productivity but minority governments imposed strict controls on African migration, which allowed only a unisex labour force in the gold mines of South Africa whilst permitting family settlement in the copper mines of what is today Zambia and Zaire.

State initiatives over the past three hundred years have played an important role in lowering mortality levels from approximately forty per thousand per year to less than ten. These policies have depended on a combination of medical knowledge, political will, and financial resources. This paper examines state initiatives which reduced national crude death rates from famine, smallpox, water-borne diseases, and tuberculosis. Despite divergent national approaches, regimes in Asia, Europe, and North America succeeded in reducing mortality from targeted causes by as much as 15 % of pre-existing national crude death rates.