War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States

War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States PDF Author: Takakazu Yamagishi
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142140091X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
World War II forced extensive and comprehensive social and political changes on nations across the globe. This comparative examination of health insurance in the United States and Japan during and after the war explores how World War II shaped the health care systems of both countries. To compare the development of health insurance in the two countries, Takakazu Yamagishi discusses the impact of total war on four factors: political structure, interest group politics, political culture, and policy feedback. During World War II, the U.S. and Japanese governments realized that healthy soldiers, workers, mothers, and children were vital to national survival. While both countries adopted new, expansive national insurance policies as part of their mobilization efforts, they approached doing so in different ways and achieved near-opposite results. In the United States, private insurance became the predominant means of insuring people, save for a few government-run programs. Japan, meanwhile, created a near-universal, public insurance system. After the war, their different policy paths were consolidated. Yamagishi argues that these disparate outcomes were the result of each nation’s respective war experience. He looks closely at postwar Japan and investigates how political struggles between the American occupation authority and U.S. domestic forces, such as the American Medical Association, helped solidify the existing Japanese health insurance system. Original and tightly argued, this volume makes a strong case for treating total war as a central factor in understanding how the health insurance systems of the two nations grew, while bearing in mind the dual nature of government intervention—however slight—in health care. Those interested in debates about health care in Japan, the United States, and other countries, and especially scholars of comparative political development, will appreciate and learn from Yamagishi’s study.

War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States

War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States PDF Author: Takakazu Yamagishi
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142140091X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
World War II forced extensive and comprehensive social and political changes on nations across the globe. This comparative examination of health insurance in the United States and Japan during and after the war explores how World War II shaped the health care systems of both countries. To compare the development of health insurance in the two countries, Takakazu Yamagishi discusses the impact of total war on four factors: political structure, interest group politics, political culture, and policy feedback. During World War II, the U.S. and Japanese governments realized that healthy soldiers, workers, mothers, and children were vital to national survival. While both countries adopted new, expansive national insurance policies as part of their mobilization efforts, they approached doing so in different ways and achieved near-opposite results. In the United States, private insurance became the predominant means of insuring people, save for a few government-run programs. Japan, meanwhile, created a near-universal, public insurance system. After the war, their different policy paths were consolidated. Yamagishi argues that these disparate outcomes were the result of each nation’s respective war experience. He looks closely at postwar Japan and investigates how political struggles between the American occupation authority and U.S. domestic forces, such as the American Medical Association, helped solidify the existing Japanese health insurance system. Original and tightly argued, this volume makes a strong case for treating total war as a central factor in understanding how the health insurance systems of the two nations grew, while bearing in mind the dual nature of government intervention—however slight—in health care. Those interested in debates about health care in Japan, the United States, and other countries, and especially scholars of comparative political development, will appreciate and learn from Yamagishi’s study.

Health Insurance Politics in Japan

Health Insurance Politics in Japan PDF Author: Takakazu Yamagishi
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501763512
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
Japan is the fastest aging country, with the largest super-aged society in the world and growing larger by the day, yet its universal health care costs are relatively low. In Health Insurance Politics in Japan, Takakazu Yamagishi draws back the curtain for an international audience and investigates how Japan has been able to control health care costs through health insurance politics. Covering the period from the Meiji Restoration to the Abe Administration, Yamagishi uses a historical institutionalist approach to examine the driving force behind the development of health insurance policies in Japan. Yamagishi pays special attention to the roles of government and medical professionals, the main actors of the policymaking and medical worlds, in this development. Health Insurance Politics in Japan pushes Japan into the spotlight of the international conversation about health care reform.

New and Liberal Features of War Risk Insurance

New and Liberal Features of War Risk Insurance PDF Author: United States. Bureau of War Risk Insurance
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Government life insurance
Languages : en
Pages : 52

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Book Description


Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945-52

Reforming Public Health in Occupied Japan, 1945-52 PDF Author: Christopher Aldous
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113649880X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
Whilst most facets of the Occupation of Japan have attracted much scholarly debate in recent decades, this is not the case with reforms relating to public health. The few studies of this subject largely follow the celebratory account of US-inspired advances, strongly associated with Crawford Sams, the key figure in the Occupation charged with carrying them out. This book tests the validity of this dominant narrative, interrogating its chief claims, exploring the influences acting on it, and critically examining the reform’s broader significance for the Occupation and its legacies for both Japan and the US. The book argues that rather than presiding over a revolution in public health, the Public Health and Welfare Section, headed by Sams, recommended methods of epidemic disease control and prevention that were already established in Japan and were not the innovations that they were often claimed to be. Where high incidence of such endemic diseases as dysentery and tuberculosis reflected serious socio-economic problems or deficiencies in sanitary infrastructure, little was done in practice to tackle the fundamental problems of poor water quality, the continued use of night soil as fertilizer and pervasive malnutrition. Improvements in these areas followed the trajectory of recovery, growth and rising prosperity in the 1950s and 1960s. This book will be important reading for anyone studying Japanese History, the History of Medicine, Public Health in Asia and Asian Social Policy.

Social Functions and Economic Aspects of Health Insurance

Social Functions and Economic Aspects of Health Insurance PDF Author: William A. Rushing
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400942311
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Statistics published by the U. S. Department of Commerce (1980) indicate that in 1977 we spent 8. 1% of our gross national product (GNP) on life, health, property-casualty, and other forms of insurance. An additional 5. 7% was used to pay the Social Security tax, which is another form of insurance premium, for a total of 14. 8% of the GNP. \ Although insurance had its historical origin in marine insurance, it has now developed into one of the major industries of the American economy and extends into many areas of economic activity. One area where growth has been particularly strong is the medical sector. Health insurance is a major institution in all industrialized countries. It became a government responsibility in 1883 when Bismarck intro duced a compulsory program of health insurance for industrial workers in Germany. Programs for workers in various industrial and income categories soon followed in other European countries-Austria (1888), Hungary (1891), Norway (1909), Servia (1910), Great Britain (1911), and Russia and Romania (1912) (Rubinow, 1913:250). Programs in these countries were extended in subsequent years, and other countries in Europe followed with their own programs. Consequently, today most industrial countries have universal or near-universal health insurance coverage. In the United States the issue of national health insurance has been seriously debated since just prior to World War I, and polling data since the 1930s show that a substantial majority of the public has been supportive of such a program (Erskine, 1975).

Public Health and Cold War Politics in Asia

Public Health and Cold War Politics in Asia PDF Author: Liping Bu
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000953947
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 230

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Book Description
Bu and her contributors illustrate the complexity of tensions and negotiations in the development of different types of public health systems in Asia during the early Cold War. Competing models of development with different political ideologies and economic enterprises increasingly influenced Asian countries in their efforts to build modern nations after World War II. Looking at examples from China, Japan, South and North Korea, India, and Indonesia, the contributors to this volume look at how a range of Asian countries handled this postcolonial challenge. Health became a pivotal area that sustained the political discourse of differentiating one type of society from the other and promoting each system’s advantages over the other’s during the Cold War. Central to the discourse of a just society and the well-being of citizens was the promotion of public health and welfare for the people. The right to health was considered a fundamental human right as well as an essential social justice. A healthy population was also a prerequisite for national economic prosperity. Public health in postwar Asia was, therefore, a sociopolitical matter as well as a concern for the well-being of individuals. The health of the people demonstrated the advancement of a nation and provided the insurance for economic productivity and national prosperity. An essential read for historians and policymakers of public health and historians of Asia during the Cold War.

Health Economics of Japan

Health Economics of Japan PDF Author: Akihiro Yoshikawa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Comparing the Japanese system with that of the United States, the researchers analyze economic decision making and resource allocation, the organization of Japan's health insurance system, the staffing of hospitals, the adoption of medical technologies, and the prescription of medications.

Japan's Shifting Status in the World and the Development of Japan's Medical Insurance Systems

Japan's Shifting Status in the World and the Development of Japan's Medical Insurance Systems PDF Author: Yoneyuki Sugita
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9811316600
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This book explains the origins and early developments of Japanese medical insurance systems from the 1920s to the 1950s. It closely examines the changes in the systems and the symbiotic relationship between Japan’s status in international relations and the development of domestic medical insurance systems. While previous studies have regarded the origins and development of Japanese medical insurance systems as merely a domestic issue and pay little attention to the role or effects of international affairs, this book closely examines the changes in these systems by looking at the enactment of the Health Insurance Law in 1922, the establishment of the National Health Insurance in 1938, the epoch-making reforms of 1942, numerous plans in the early Allied occupation period, and Japan’s social security plan in 1950. In doing so, it shows that there was indeed a symbiotic relationship between Japan’s status in international relations and the changing nature of domestic medical insurance systems. It also reveals that Japan’s status in international relations set the framework within which interested groups, primarily the government, made rational choices. This book is a valuable resource for academics, researchers and students who have an interest in the Japanese medical insurance systems.

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War

Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War PDF Author: W. Puck Brecher
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824881370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
This wide-ranging collection seeks to reassess conventional understanding of Japan’s Asia-Pacific War by defamiliarizing and expanding the rhetorical narrative. Its nine chapters, diverse in theme and method, are united in their goal to recover a measured historicity about the conflict by either introducing new areas of knowledge or reinterpreting existing ones. Collectively, they cast doubt on the war as familiar and recognizable, compelling readers to view it with fresh eyes. Following an introduction that problematizes timeworn narratives about a “unified Japan” and its “illegal war” or “race war,” early chapters on the destruction of Japan’s diplomatic records and government interest in an egalitarian health care policy before, during, and after the war oblige us to question selective histories and moral judgments about wartime Japan. The discussion then turns to artistic/cultural production and self-determination, specifically to Osaka rakugo performers who used comedy to contend with state oppression and to the role of women in creating care packages for soldiers abroad. Other chapters cast doubt on well-trod stereotypes (Japan’s lack of pragmatism in its diplomatic relations with neutral nations and its irrational and fatalistic military leadership) and examine resistance to the war by a prominent Japanese Christian intellectual. The volume concludes with two nuanced responses to race in wartime Japan, one maintaining the importance of racial categories while recognizing the “performance of Japaneseness,” the other observing that communities often reflected official government policies through nationality rather than race. Contrasting findings like these underscore the need to ask new questions and fill old gaps in our understanding of a historical event that, after more than seventy years, remains as provocative and divisive as ever. Defamiliarizing Japan’s Asia-Pacific War will find a ready audience among World War II historians as well as specialists in war and society, social history, and the growing fields of material culture and civic history.

The Changing Economics of Medical Technology

The Changing Economics of Medical Technology PDF Author: Institute of Medicine
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 030904491X
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
Americans praise medical technology for saving lives and improving health. Yet, new technology is often cited as a key factor in skyrocketing medical costs. This volume, second in the Medical Innovation at the Crossroads series, examines how economic incentives for innovation are changing and what that means for the future of health care. Up-to-date with a wide variety of examples and case studies, this book explores how payment, patent, and regulatory policiesâ€"as well as the involvement of numerous government agenciesâ€"affect the introduction and use of new pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and surgical procedures. The volume also includes detailed comparisons of policies and patterns of technological innovation in Western Europe and Japan. This fact-filled and practical book will be of interest to economists, policymakers, health administrators, health care practitioners, and the concerned public.