(Fall 2019) Public Policy POL 211- A01

  Chap 8                                                                   Healthcare         Health care policy can be viewed narrowly to mean the design and implementation of the range of federal and state programs that affect the provision of health care services, such as Medicaid and Medicare.        The high cost of healthcare in the United States will remain a challenge for the president and congress regardless of which party is in control. The combination of the high cost of and unequal access to quality health care has long been a major concern in public policy. Most people rely on employ...

Chap 7                                          The Budget and Economy Policy          Managing national deficits and debt is only one of the economic and budgetary tasks to which the federal government must attend on a continuous basis. Economy policy is critical to all other government functions but most people probably do not recognize it as readily as they do other substantive policy areas such as the environment, education, healthcare or welfare. Economy policymaking is crucial to almost everything the government does. It is the development of particular programs and policies that are intended to affect economic conditions in the nation, such as reducing unemployment or increasing economic growth. Policymakers try to promote various goals a...

Chap 6                                            Assessing Alternatives Critics of the use of efficiency as a criteria argue that one important constraint is the fact that benefits and costs are not equally distributed among the population. Often, the benefits of policies such as agricultural subsidies or subsidized tuition for college students go to particular groups in the population, but all tax payers bear the costs. Social wellbeing is composed of 2 factors, economic and equity. Critics talk about economic efficiency as a positive or objective analysis and it takes the distribution of income and resulting prices as given unless there are market failures. Second factor is equity of fairness of the distribution of these goods and services. Many economic policies ...

Chap 5- Policy Problems and Alternatives (Ideas, uncertainty and Evolution) Mark Blyth. Pdf p. 89       “…The key question becomes whether we lie in a world of uncertainty. For if we can establish that we do sometimes live in a world of uncertainty rather than risk, then it is a short step to show not only how ideas matter but further, that ideas are fundamental to any social science”.        Reality is filled with uncertainty. Seldom do we have a picture of the patch ahead, so we accept what arises with determined courage. We sometimes fear uncertainty because we lack the life skills to navigate through it. As the quote states “ideas are fundamental to any social science.” The fear of not knowing what lies ahead impedes our long-term welfare. At a deeper level, fear of the future terrifies us because of the unfamiliar conditions which lied ahead, which in turn interferes with attaining emotional freedom, therefore we create ...

                                          CHAP 4- Policy Analysis       “Constructing policy alternatives is perhaps the most important stage in the policy analysis process. Is analysts and policymakers cannot think of creative ways of solving problems, conventional approaches that may no longer be appropriate will continue to be used. “         Analyst should think about different way of approaching policy. By constructing policy alternatives, analysts are forced to think critically on how to approach a problem or situation both with the government and without it; which policy alternative is to be adopted, depends on how the policy analyst takes each of the proposed policy alternatives and applies each of the decisi...

                                               Chap 3- Understanding policy making        “One of the first decisions to be made is whether government should intervene at all to deal with a problem or simply leave its resolution to individual action or marketplace. For example, governments chose for years not to regulate smoking in public places, and then chose to do so in an escalating series of actions as scientist learned more about the health consequences of exposure to secondhand smoke so that now many states even prohibit smoking in bars and nightclubs.   Similarly, most cities and states chose to so nothing about rising levels of childhood obesity because they determined this was largely a matter of private or f...