The Politics of Health Care Policy: The United States in Comparative Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
THERE ARE FEW SCHOLARS OF HEALTH CARE POLICY who have not contemplated the irony that the United States, the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world, is the only capitalist democracy without some type of national, public health care system. Over 40 million U.S. residents are currently without access to health care, which translates into nearly one in five families with at least one uninsured member. An equal number of Americans have inadequate health coverage. Individual sickness, or that of an intimate family member without adequate health insurance, is a major source of personal bankruptcy. In addition, many workers remain stuck in uninteresting or dead-end jobs because they are afraid of losing their health insurance should they change work site or state residency (IOM 2002). Unsurprisingly, the uninsured and inadequately [End Page 592] insured are more likely to have poor health and to die prematurely than those who are adequately insured. Whether one looks at life expectancy at birth, infant mortality rates, under-five mortality rates, or infants with low birth rate, the United States scores poorly compared to other Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries (OECD 2001; U.N. Development Program 2000). The situation is even more puzzling because U.S. residents, like people elsewhere, place a high value upon good health care for those who fall ill and support an active role in providing health care for the sick (ISSP 1992, 1996).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".