US Health Care Policymaking: Ideological, Social and Cultural Differences and Major Influences

Abstract

Abstract In the more than 15 years that I have been teaching courses on health care policy, I have had medical doctors and students majoring in nursing, public health, business administration, health administration, and the physical and biological sciences ask me why they should study health politics and policies, given the fact that their interests are in the so-called “hard sciences.” My answer to this question has always been to paraphrase the first three axioms of government that Beard (1940, p. 232) formulated more than 7 decades ago.