Patients as Policy Actors

This strong volume brings together contributors of different disciplinary and experiential backgrounds, broadening our understanding of how patient voices influence American health care policy.--Elizabeth Toon "University of Manchester" "This is a fascinating book that greatly enhances our understanding of the complexities surrounding the place of the patient in modern health care." -- "Social History of Medicine" "Despite all of the recent study of patient activism, there has been little attempt to synthesize its achievements and limitations--making the scholarship as fragmented as the activism itself. Patients as Policy Actors fills this void. It should be required reading for anyone interested in how individual patients might mobilize together to help effect meaningful health care reform in the United States."--Barron H. Lerner, MD, PhD "When Illness Goes Public: Celebrity Patients and How We Look at Medicine" "A valuable, timely book. It is a guide to developments in the field, critical with the new federal health care law soon to become fully operational. Highly recommended." -- "Choice" "Patients as Policy Actors provides food for thought on the representation of patients' voices in a variety of health care arenas. This edited anthology is both academic and intended to foster change. It evaluates patient effectiveness, from patients' struggles to be heard to their successful mobilization of resources for shared interests." -- "Bulletin of the History of Medicine"

NANCY TOMES is a professor in the history department at Stony Brook University. She is the author of several books,among them, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life.MARK SCHLESINGER is a professor of health policy and a fellow of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University and past editor of the Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law.NANCY TOMES is a professor in the history department at Stony Brook University. She is the author of several books,among them, The Gospel of Germs: Men, Women, and the Microbe in American Life