Health and Healing in America

This week, continue reading in Rutkow’s book, Chapters 2 and 3, and the printed essay from The Birth of the Clinic by Michel Foucault. Continue reading →

Since Worcester State was cancelled on Feb 5th, we had to combine two classes. Continue reading →

I appreciated the lively discussion during our first in-person meeting last evening. Things are off to a great start! Here is what you will need for this next week. Continue reading →

Thanks for checking in with a first journal entry this week and for going along with my experimental online lecture. I appreciated hearing from each of you and look forward to our first in-person meeting:
Continue reading →

Hello all! Sorry it took me longer to post this than I had planned – but here is the material for our first day of class (“virtual”), Wednesday Jan 22nd. Continue reading →

This website serves as the hub for Tona Hangen’s history course, “Health and Healing in America,” for the Spring 2014 semester at Worcester State University. This course will be taught as a hybrid course, partly online but with about half our time in face-to-face meetings. On those dates (see the “Schedule” tab above) we will meet in room S2-351 at UMass Medical School, Worcester MA from 5-8 pm.

The textbooks for this course are listed under the “Readings” tab above.

From this website, you can download the syllabus or access it online, stay up to date with course news and any changes, see the guidelines for the course papers and projects, and follow links to my recommended intellectual history and writing resources on the web.

This site is a blog, meaning it updates frequently and therefore you should either bookmark it or subscribe to it using an RSS feed reader (such as Feedly) to stay up to date with all the course news and updates. To subscribe, just click on the orange RSS symbol in the sidebar. I leave up the previous semesters’ information as an archive for my past students. You can safely ignore any post tagged “Spr2013” or earlier.

If you have questions about the course before we meet in person in January, please feel free to email me, at thangen (at) worcester.edu

Our workshop generated some terrific questions and I added a few of my own. Here are some topics to study; the exam’s questions will be based on this list, as well as the glossary wiki and people wiki terms. Continue reading →

During this unit, we’ll work at understanding our tremendously complex American health care system: its origins, current reform efforts, issues for debate, consequences, and possible future.

Wed 4/17 – View Michael Moore’s film Sicko. Response Paper #3 due.

Mon 4/22 – How Did We Get Here? Reading: Stevens, “History and Health Policy in the US” (PDF on Blackboard)

In-class link: “Why is American Health Care So Ridiculously Expensive?” (The Atlantic 3/27/13)

Wed 4/24 – Costs: Economic, Social and Ethical. Reading and Listening: Farmer, “Pathologies of Power” (PDF on Blackboard) and LISTEN to and take notes on this October 2009 hour-long episode of the NPR program This American Life

Links we watched in class:
MRI Costs (Washington Post WonkTalk, March 2013)
Health Care System Overview (Khan Academy)
Journalist Steven Brill talks about his Time cover story on Medical Bills (March 2013)

Mon 4/29 – Health Care Reform, Law & Policy. Start by browsing this site: Healthcare.gov

Then read these:
Health Care Reform – Top 10 Pros/Cons on Procon.org
“The Case for Universal Health Care in the United States,” AMSA (American Medical Student Association), 2008
Robert A. Levy, “The Case Against President Obama’s Health Care Reform: A Primer for Nonlawyers,” Cato Institute White Paper, 2011 (12-page downloadable PDF)
“Fighting to Control the Word ‘Obamacare'” NYT 25 March 2012
“The ABCs of the Health Care Law and its Future,” NYT 2 April 2012

Note: there quite a number of polemical websites, you might want to look at a few, keeping in mind none of these are official or scholarly sources –

Obamacarefacts.com
Obamacareprosandcons.org
therepealpledge.com
HeritageFoundation.org’s content on Obamacare
CommonHealth: Reform and Reality (WBUR.org)
NYT: Multimedia content on the Affordable Care Act and the Supreme Court

Wed 5/1 – The HC Debate in Microcosm. See the “Debate” tab at the top of the course website. Prepare for the debate by taking, and supporting with evidence, a position in the health care debate. Due in class: Your Position Paper

Mon 5/6 – Wrap Up Day and Exam Prep. We will complete the Glossary in or before class, and work on developing the format for the final together.

Mon 5/13 – Final Exam 12:30 pm. Due at the final: Your Course Reflection Paper (prompt TBA)