UTA professor’s book explains complex world of public health, individual medical services

The University of Texas at Arlington News Releases


A book from a UTA associate professor explains why the United States has the health system it has.
Daniel Sledge, associate professor of political science at The University of Texas at Arlington, wrote Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State, published by University Press of Kansas.



Daniel Sledge, associate professor of political science at The University of Texas at Arlington, wrote Health Divided: Public Health and Individual Medicine in the Making of the Modern American State, which was recently published by University Press of Kansas.

The book explains why the federal government emerged as a central force in promoting public health work, through the CDC, while engaging in the promotion of individual medical services on a patchwork basis. Sledge said there has been a great deal continuity in the American health care system since the 1960s, when the creation of Medicare and Medicaid helped to lock in a system underpinned by employer-sponsored health insurance.
“Under slightly different circumstances, we could have ended up with far more extensive federal government involvement in providing access to health services,” said Sledge, who specializes in health policy and politics at UTA. “Beyond this, individual medical services might have been more closely integrated with preventive and public health efforts.”
In addition, Health Divided portrays Obamacare as consistent with long-standing patterns in American health politics, with state-based exchanges and Medicaid expansion layered on top of the existing health care system.




“Future changes will likely remain consistent with these patterns, rather than overturning existing institutions,” Sledge said. “Going forward, we would expect effective change to occur within the framework of employer-sponsored health insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, and the state-based exchanges. Reforms that seek to upend these arrangements are highly unlikely to make it through Congress.”
Sledge said that many attempts at national health insurance have failed because the melding of ...

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