Mental illness is the poor, and somehow "damaged," cousin to physical ailments in the eyes of too many in our society. Compare the difference in how people would respond to someone who had fallen and broken their leg on the street, to how most react to those mentally ill among us, on those same streets, who spend their winters on steam grates and forage for food in dumpsters. Rationing Sanity is a provocative analysis of the mental health care system in the United States, dealing with issues of justice and access to mental health care. How should a decent society, affluent but facing many serious calls on its resources, best care for citizens afflicted with severe and persistent mental illnesses? James Lindemann Nelson brings together, for the first time, scholars of the ethics of mental health care and top managed care policy analysts to address this crucial problem. Rationing Sanity integrates those perspectives with the thoughtful practice-based experience of physicians well versed in the actual care of people with emotional and behavioral problems. Over a period of years, the contributors met face-to-face to engage each other on the ethics of managed mental health care—the result is a unique, collaborative effort that provides a wealth of important new insights on not only how Americans can readjust their attitudes toward the mentally ill—but also how we may find more just and humane treatment for those afflicted.

The retirement of the baby boom generation will create spiraling costs for health care and pension programs. Combined with lower revenues, these developments will lead to a decline in economic growth if nothing is done. In this second volume of Restoring Fiscal Sanity, a group of policy experts focus on how to bring spending and revenues in line over the next decade, and even more important, how to balance them over the longer term. They suggest reforms in the tax system, Social Security, and Medicare that might close this looming gap and put the nation on a sounder fiscal footing. Contributors include Henry J. Aaron, William G. Gale, Ron Haskins, Jack Meyer, and Peter R. Orszag (Brookings Institution), Rudolph G. Penner and C. Eugene Steuerle (Urban Institute), and John B. Shoven (Stanford University).

Focusing on policies that do not shift costs to the states or the private sector, this book suggests reforms in federal programs that have the potential to reduce the growth of spending for the entire health system, increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the care provided, and enhance health outcomes.

Public Health

Through a unique interdisciplinary perspective on quality management in heath care, this text covers the subjects of operations management, organizational behavior, and health services research. With a particular focus on Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement, the challenges of implementation and institutionalization are addressed using examples from a variety of health care organizations. Updated material includes a new focus on reducing medical errors, the introduction of CPOE, Baldridge Award criteria, and seven new case studies.

. Through a unique interdisciplinary perspective on quality management in health care, this text covers the subjects of operations management, organizational behavior, and health services research. With a particular focus on Total Quality Management and Continuous Quality Improvement, the challenges of implementation and institutionalization are addressed using examples from a variety of health care organizations, including primary care clinics, hospital laboratories, public health departments, and academic health centers. Important Notice: The digital edition of this book is missing some of the images or content found in the physical edition

Contemporary Catholic Health Care Ethics, Second Edition, integrates theology, methodology, and practical application into a detailed and practical examination of the bioethical issues that confront students, scholars, and practitioners. Noted bioethicists Gerard Magill, Henk ten Have, and David F. Kelly contribute diverse backgrounds and experience that inform the richness of new material covered in this second edition. The book is organized into three sections: theology (basic issues underlying Catholic thought), methodology (how Catholic theology approaches moral issues, including birth control), and applications to current issues. New chapters discuss controversial end-of-life issues such as forgoing treatment, killing versus allowing patients to die, ways to handle decisions for incompetent patients, advance directives, and physician-assisted suicide. Unlike anthologies, the coherent text offers a consistent method in order to provide students, scholars, and practitioners with an understanding of ethical dilemmas as well as concrete examples to assist in the difficult decisions they must make on an everyday basis.

Discusses the various implications of the new managed-care health care systems.

In Moody Minds Distempered philosopher Jennifer Radden assembles several decades of her research on melancholy and depression. The chapters are ordered into three categories: those about intellectual and medical history of melancholy and depression; those that emphasize aspects of the moral, psychological and medical features of these concepts; and finally, those that explore the sad and apprehensive mood states long associated with melancholy and depressive subjectivity. A newly written introduction maps the conceptual landscape, and draws out the analytic and thematic interconnections between the chapters.Radden emphasizes and develops several new themes: the implications, theoretical phenomenological and moral, of recognizing melancholy and depressive states as mood states; questions of method, as they affect how we understand and characterize claims about melancholy and depression; and the persistence and force of cultural tropes linking such states to brilliance, creativity, and sagacity. Insights from literature and the history of medicine, psychology, and psychiatry are woven together with those from the more recent disciplines of feminist theory and cultural studies. This is interdisciplinary writing at its best-part analytic philosophy, and part history of ideas.

Exploring a variety of methods for improving the economic performance of organizations, this multidisciplinary text covers macro- and micro-perspectives while considering strategic planning, systematic process analysis, leadership studies, group dynamics, and human motivation theories. It highlights "quality of relationships" as a guiding principle within the framework of public administration and stresses customer, client, and stakeholder satisfaction. With over 1000 literature references, tables, drawings, and equations, and appendices of laws and regulations, the book responds to the mandate for high performance and increased productivity.