Public Administration

Our health care system is crippled by desperate efforts to prevent the inevitable. A third of the national Medicare budget - nearly $175 billion - is spent on the final year of life, and a third of that amount on the final month, often on expensive (and futile) treatments. Such efforts betray a fundamental flaw in how we think about healthcare: we squander resources on hopeless situations, instead of using them to actually improve health.

Who cares? Ricardo Lange, Intensivpfleger, liebt seinen Beruf - und leidet an ihm. So sehr, dass er seinem Ärger über die Missstände in der Pflege auf Facebook Luft macht und an die Öffentlichkeit geht. Deutschlandweite Berühmtheit erlangt er, als er von Jens Spahn zur Bundespressekonferenz eingeladen wird und dort vom Krankenhausalltag berichtet: von den katastrophalen Arbeitsbedingungen, der permanenten körperlichen und emotionalen Überlastung und dem sicheren Gefühl, dass sich die Politik nicht wirklich dafür interessiert.

For African Americans in the southern United States, the social determinants of health are influenced by a unique history that encompasses hundreds of years of slavery, injustices during the Jim Crow era, the Great Migration, the civil rights era, and contemporary experiences like the Black Lives Matter movement. Black activists, physicians, and communities continue to battle inequities and structural problems that include poverty, inadequate access to health care, incarceration, a lack of transportation, and food insecurity.

COVID-19 is the biggest public health and economic disaster of our time. It has posed the same threat across the globe, yet countries have responded very differently and some have clearly fared much better than others. Peter Baldwin uncovers the reasons why in this definitive account of the global politics of pandemic. He shows that how nations responded depended above all on the political tools available—how firmly could the authorities order citizens' lives and how willingly would they be obeyed?

With its signature "DARE to keep kids off drugs" slogan and iconic t-shirts, DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) was the most popular drug education program of the 1980s and 1990s. But behind the cultural phenomenon is the story of how DARE and other antidrug education programs brought the War on Drugs into schools and ensured that the velvet glove of antidrug education would be backed by the iron fist of rigorous policing and harsh sentencing.

Why a book on health care? Our systems have long been broken, even before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. The great progress in medicine is just not affordable any longer. Widespread frustration prevails and finger pointing in a silo-mentality are dominating the public narrative on the matter. Why have we missed the train of digitalization and value-based principles in health care? Any other industry has long recognized that customer focus is the holy grail to success. But, in health care, why have we so terribly lost focus on our ultimate customer - the patient?

Der "Financial Times"-Journalist Joe Miller hat Ugur Sahin und Özlem Türeci seit März 2020 begleitet. Zusammen mit ihnen beschreibt Miller das ungewöhnliche Jahr 2020 und zeichnet die Jagd nach dem ersten Impfstoff nach, die politischen Kämpfe und den Moment des Triumphs. Das Buch erzählt die persönliche Geschichte der beiden Wissenschaftler, wie Sahin und Türeci als Paar zusammenarbeiten, wie die mRNA-Technologie funktioniert und wie sie ihren Hauptforschungsschwerpunkt beeinflussen wird - die Krebsforschung.

For decades, researchers have chased a pharmaceutical cure for memory loss. But despite the fact that no disease-modifying biotech treatments have emerged, new research suggests that dementia rates have actually declined in the United States and Western Europe over the last decade. Why is this happening? And what does it mean for brain health in the future?

We have entered what is called the "biological century" and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America's collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape - one that fuels today's culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms.

Amid a growing consensus that the staggering toll of gun violence in the United States is an urgent public health issue, the Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health has convened experts on gun policy and violence from the United States and selected other countries to summarize relevant research and its implications for policymakers and concerned citizens. Legal scholars weigh in on the constitutionality of recommended policies, and researchers present new data on public support for a wide array of policies designed to reduce gun violence.

Congress passed it. President Obama signed it into law. The Supreme Court has ruled it constitutional. And Obama's re-election virtually ensures the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, will be implemented in full, with the prospects of wholesale repeal all but impossible. In fact, many provisions of the new law are already becoming a reality with major new regulations set to start soon.

Over the past three decades, the once-efficient American health care system has evolved into a complex maze of monopolies and a racket of bureaucratic checks, approvals, denials, roadblocks, and detours. This shift has created a massive and at times redundant workforce that frustrates patients, as well as physicians, nurses, and administrative staff. Health care costs the United States more than $11,000 for each person in the country each year - more than double what it costs in most Western European countries to deliver equal or even better care.

The biggest problem in American health care is us. Do you know how to tell good health care from bad health care? Guess again. As patients, we wrongly assume the "best" care is dependent mainly on the newest medications, the most complex treatments, and the smartest doctors. But Americans look for health-care solutions in the wrong places. For example, hundreds of thousands of lives could be saved each year if doctors reduced common errors and maximized preventive medicine.

The poor die sooner. Blacks die sooner. And poor urban Blacks die sooner than almost all other Americans. David Ansell has spent nearly four decades as a doctor at hospitals serving some of the poorest communities in Chicago, and has witnessed firsthand the lives behind these devastating statistics. In

The Death Gap, he gives a grim survey of these realities, drawn from observations and stories of his patients.

In The Truth About Obamacare, Sally C. Pipes - president of the Pacific Research Institute and an acknowledged expert on health care reform - reveals what Democrats in Congress and President Barack Obama don't want you to know: Obamacare is even worse than most critics suspect. Debunking the myths that the current administration has touted, Pipes shows exactly what the new health care law will mean for you, your family, your doctor, and your wallet.

Es imposible calcular el alcance exacto de la crisis del Coronavirus en nuestra economía, salud y forma de vida a partir de ahora. Lo único que sabemos es que salimos a un mundo distinto al que hemos conocido, y eso no tiene que ser necesariamente malo. Para vivir esta nueva era llena de desafíos, 20 maestros nos dan, cada cual desde su campo, un kit de supervivencia para vivir de forma proactiva, optimista y sin miedo.

Uwe Reinhardt was a towering figure and moral conscience of health care policy in the United States and beyond. Famously bipartisan, he advised presidents and Congress on health reform and originated central features of the Affordable Care Act. In Priced Out, Reinhardt offers an engaging and enlightening account of today's US health care system, explaining why it costs so much more and delivers so much less than the systems of every other advanced country, why this situation is morally indefensible, and how we might improve it.

The work of academics can matter and be influential on a public level, but the path to becoming a public intellectual, influential policy advisor, valued community resource, or go-to person on an issue is not one that most scholars are trained for. The Public Professor offers scholars ways to use their ideas, research, and knowledge to change the world.

With relentless media coverage, breathtaking events, and extraordinary congressional and independent investigations, it is hard to believe that we still might not know some of the most significant facts about the presidency of George W. Bush. Yet beneath the surface events of the Bush presidency lies a secret history, a series of hidden events that makes a mockery of current debate.

In The Invented State, Emily Thorson argues that a problematic and understudied aspect of political misinformation reflects widespread public misperception about what the government does. Because much of public policy is invisible to the public, there is fertile ground for false beliefs to flourish, leading to what Thorson terms the "invented state": systematic misperceptions about public policy.