This book provides a multi-disciplinary framework for developing and analyzing health sector reforms, based on the authors' extensive international experience. It offers practical guidance - useful to policymakers, consultants, academics, and students alike - and stresses the need to take account of each country's economic, administrative, and political circumstances. The authors explain how to design effective government interventions in five areas - financing, payment, organization, regu...

Island of Dreams: Environmental Crisis in Japan, the classic work that explores Japan's tragic environmental crisis, is back in print to celebrate the book's Fiftieth Anniversary since it was first published in 1975. This edition includes a new preface by the authors to show the relevance of Japan's past experiences with environmental pollution to today's global crisis.The book describes the human consequences of Minamata disease, PCB poisoning, and Japan'...

Starting in the 1990s, San Francisco launched a series of bold but relatively unknown public policy experiments to improve wages and benefits for thousands of local workers. Since then, scholars have documented the effects of those policies on compensation, productivity, job creation, and health coverage. Opponents predicted a range of negative impacts, but the evidence tells a decidedly different tale. This book brings together that evidence for the first time, reviews it as a whole, and ...

The third quarter of the twentieth century was a golden age for labor in the advanced industrial countries, characterized by rising incomes, relatively egalitarian wage structures, and reasonable levels of job security. The subsequent quarter-century has seen less positive performance along a number of these dimensions. This period has instead been marked by rapid globalization of economic activity that has brought increased insecurity to workers. The contributors to this volume distinguis...

Health Care in Canada examines the challenges faced by the Canadian health care system, a subject of much public debate. In this book Katherine Fierlbeck provides an in-depth discussion of how health care decisions are shaped by politics and why there is so much disagreement over how to fix the system.Many Canadians point to health care as a source of national pride; others are highly critical of the system's shortcomings and call for major reform. Yet meaningful debate ca...

Health care is Canada’s best-loved social program — and for good reason. For over forty years, Canadians have enjoyed high quality health services based on need rather than on ability to pay. Yet we hear almost daily accounts of problems with the system. We are bombarded with warnings that public health care is unsustainable, especially in light of the baby boomer generation reaching retirement age. Such stories can help undermine our support for public care even though they are often base...

From one of the leading policy experts of our time, an urgent rethinking of how we can better support each other to thriveWhether we realize it or not, all of us participate in the social contract every day through mutual obligations among our family, community, place of work, and fellow citizens. Caring for others, paying taxes, and benefiting from public services define the social contract that supports and binds us together as a society. Today, however, our soci...

Canada has been among the world leaders in recognizing the multiple factors that impact health. Focusing on Canada’s health care system, Raisa B. Deber provides brief descriptions of some key facts and concepts necessary to understand health care policy in Canada and place it in an international context.An accessible guide, Treating Health Care unpacks key concepts to provide informed discussions that help us understand and diagnose Canada’s health care system and to clari...

Regulation is often thought of as an activity that restricts behaviour and prevents the occurrence of certain undesirable activities, but the influence of regulation can also be enabling or facilitative, as when a market could potentially be chaotic if uncontrolled. This Handbook provides a clear and authoritative discussion of the major trends and issues in regulation over the last thirty years, together with an outline of prospective developments. It brings together contributionsfrom lea...

Often described as a public policy “bible,” Weimer and Vining remains the essential primer it ever was. Now in its sixth edition, Policy Analysis provides a strong conceptual foundation of the rationales for and the limitations to public policy. It offers practical advice about how to do policy analysis, but goes a bit deeper to demonstrate the application of advanced analytical techniques through the use of case studies. Updates to this edition include:A chapter ded...

Before the COVID‐19 pandemic, the idea of providing a basic income to everyone in Canada who needs it was already gaining broad support. Then, in response to a crisis that threatened to put millions out of work, the federal government implemented new measures which constituted Canada's largest ever experiment with a basic income for almost everyone.In this new and revised edition, Evelyn L. Forget offers a clear‐eyed look at how these emergency measures could be transformed into a ...

Medicare has been a crucial part of Canadian identity for nearly fifty years, and it stands in marked contrast to the US health system. But these facts alone do not protect it from dismissive swipes and criticisms, claims that the system is unsustainable, and even proposals to change medicare's fundamentals. In Canadian Medicare, Stephen Duckett and Adrian Peetoom show that the shared values underpinning medicare still provide a sound basis for the system's design. While medicare remains a...