Health Law, Ethics & Policy Workshop - Speaker: Colleen Grogan

University of Toronto, Faculty of Law
Health Law, Ethics & Policy Workshop Series
&
The School for Public Policy and Governance

present

Colleen Grogan
School of Social Service Administration, University of Chicago

The Hidden Politics of Public Health Policies

12:30 – 2:00
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Solarium (room FA2) – Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park 

 Did the Affordable Care Act (ACA) usher in a new era of public health as many claim? To answer this question one first needs to determine the size of the public health care state prior to the ACA. This effort unveils many hidden public health care provisions raising doubts about repeated claims of a residual public health policy in the US and spending at 3% of total health care expenditures. The key to understanding the politics of public health is to recognize that defining the boundaries of the field was a central political conflict throughout the 20^th century and continues today. Numerous scholars acknowledge that the term “public health” is laden with ambiguous meanings. The reason for this ambiguity lies in the fact that efforts to clearly define the field are partly scientific, but largely political. These hidden omissions of public health are multifaceted, but can be categorized for simplicity into three main areas: (1) hiding across agency jurisdictions; (2) hiding in ambiguous framings of services as either treatment or prevention; and (3) hiding in public health infrastructure. Each one is examined—currently and with an example from the past—and helps reveal the politics behind the crafting of public health spending.  While the historical examples are relatively brief given the space constraints of a paper, I conclude by arguing that while the ACA provides important new provisions for emphasizing the concerns of public health, the arguments behind this spending are based on long-standing political logics.  

Colleen M. Grogan is a Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her areas of research interest include health policy, health politics, participatory processes and the American welfare state. She has written several book chapters and articles on the political evolution and current politics of the US Medicaid program. She co-authored a book with Michael Gusmano titled Healthy Voice/Unhealthy Silence: Advocating for Poor Peoples’ Health (2007), which explores efforts to include representatives of the poor and disadvantaged in health policy decision making.  Professor Grogan is currently working on a book titled America’s Hidden Health Care State, which examines and exposes the historic evolution of public health care spending through private entities in the U.S. health care system. Another project underway focuses on the potential of nonprofit organizations operating in vulnerable communities to address problems of political inequality, and to better represent the poor in health policy decisionmaking. She is Editor of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law. Special and themed issues from 2011 include: Critical Essays on Health Care Reform (36.3 June), and Affordable Health Insurance: What’s Fair and Who Decides? (36.5 October). Grogan is also the Academic Director of the Graduate Program in Health Administration and Policy (GPHAP) and the Co-Director of the Center for Health Administration Studies (CHAS) at the University of Chicago.

A light lunch will be served.

For more information about this workshop, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca