Chapter 17 Flashcards
(20 cards)
Health maintenance organization
Definition: a network of health care providers that directly provides all or most of a person’s health care for a yearly fee.
Connection: Private market forces have changes the country’s health care system dramatically.
Uninsured Americans
Definition: americans in the U.S. that are not covered by an insurance policy.
Connection: Nearly 50 million people are without health insurance coverage and the uninsured are more likely to be hopitalized for conditions that could have been prevented.
Medicare
Definition: health care insurance for the elderly.
Connection: part of the Social Security system and covers nearly 50 million people.
Medicaid
Definition: the program designed to provide health care for the poor (including the elderly poor)
Connection: serves more than 50 million people, most of whom are children and adults in low-income families.
National Health Insurance
Definition: a compulsory insurance program to finance all Americans’ medical care.
Connection: It was strongly opposed by the American Medical Asscociation becasue the program would be government run; unlike all other developed countries, the U.S. doesn’t have a national health insurance.
Children’s Health Insurance Program
Definition: a state and federal partnership that targets uninsured children and pregnant women in families with incomes too high to qualify for most state Medicaid programs but, often, too low to afford private coverage.
Connection: the programs that are available for families that can’t qualify for certain insurance policies but still need it.
Health Security Act (failed Clinton Plan)
Definition: an effort to deal with the two great problems of health care policy: costs and access.
Connection: The difficulties the president faced with this proposal reveal much about the challenging of reforming health care in the U.S.
Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act
Definition: a health reform legislation that includes health related provisions intended to extend coverage to millions of unisured Americans, to implement measures that will lower health care costs and improve system efficiency, and to eliminate industry practices that include rescission and denial of coverage due to pre-existing conditions.
Connection: The president faced a strategic problem in attempting to reform the health care system without igniting fears that people could lose what they liked about their own health care.
Environmental Protection Agency
Definition: The nation’s largest federal regulatory agency charged with administering policies dealing with land use, air, and water quality, and wilderness and wildlife preservation.
Connection: the different federal beuracracies that exsits and their policies.
National Environmental Policy Act
Definition: requires government agencies to file an environmental impact statement with the EPA everytime they propose to undertake a policy that is potentially disruptive to the natural environment.
Connection: The law gives environmental groups the oppurtunity to delay construction so much that agencies simply give up.
Environmental impact statements
Definition: A procedural requirement that alerts enviormentalists to proposed projects and details possible environmental effects od the propsed policy.
Connection: they are usually so complicated and dificult to predict, it is easy to argue that the statements are either incomplete or inaccurate in some way.
Clean Air Act of 1970
Definition: charges the EPA with protecting and improving the quality of the nation’s air, to minimize people’s exposure to airborne contaminants.
Connection: Over time, Congress has reauthorized the Clean Air Act and significantly increased the controls on cars, oil refineries, chemical plants, and coal-fired utility plants.
Water Pollution Control Act of 1972
Definition: law enacted by Congress to control pollution of the nation’s lakes and rivers.
Connection: this law was enacted in reaction to the tremendous pollution of Northeastern rivers and the Great Lakes.
Endangered Species Act of 1973
Definition: required the government to actively protect each of the hundreds of species listed as endangered, regardless of the economic consequences for the areas that were the habitats of the species.
Connection: created an endangered species prtoection program in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act
Definition: gives EPA the authority to control hazardous waste from the “cradle-to-grave.” This includes the generation, transportation, treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste.
Connection: the laws that have been made to ensure the protection of the environment.
Superfund
Definition: A fund created by Congress in 1980 to clean up hazardous waste sites. Money for the fund comes from taxing chemical products.
Connection: the EPA administers the Superfund law and has located and analyzed tens of thousands of hazardous sites.
Global Warming
Definition: The increase in the earth’s temperature that, accordign to most scientists, is occurring as a result of the carbon dioxide that is produced when fossil fuels are burned collecting in the atmosphere and trapping energy from the sun.
Connection:There are conflicting views on ways to reduce global warming so little progress has been made in the U.S.
Fossil Fuels
Definition: buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth’s crust over hundreds of millions of years.
Connection: the different ways our country gets its energy and the problems that come with it.
Nuclear Energy
Definition: the energy released during nuclear fission or fusion, especially when used to generate electricity
Connection: there is a lot of controversy about using nuclear energy in our country.
Alternative Energy
Definition: energy generated in ways that do not deplete natural resources or harm the environment, especially by avoiding the use of fossil fuels and nuclear power.
Connection: Although they may ultimately play a significant role, the contribution of alternative energy sources to America’s energy supply is likely to remain small for the future.
