The time is Summer 2022. Covid 19 has been quashed and the world is safe once again. You have just graduated with your baccalaureate degree and have been accepted into graduate school for Fall 2023. Earlier this year, you had decided that before starting graduate school you wanted to have a new and different experience and you applied to become a Congressional Intern, specifically to work on a newly minted joint congressional committee (having representation from both the US House of Representatives and the US Senate) and charged with studying health care systems utilized by other developed countries in the world. Happily, you were selected for an internship (in part because of your extensive knowledge of the “Sociology of Health”), you have relocated to Washington, DC, and yesterday you completed your internship orientation.
As you are given more information about the work of the committee, you learn that at the end of the period of study, the joint committee is to prepare recommendations for a system that would provide basic health care in the US and will become a bill introduced to each chamber of Congress. In unprecedented unanimity, the joint committee is bi-partisan in composition with members committed to developing a proposal that will find sufficient support from both Republicans and Democrats to become the law of the land.
Your internship is quite prestigious and includes opportunity to work closely with the joint committee, serving as a resource person, and eventually traveling as part of the delegation that will visit and observe how the health care systems of various countries operate.
Your first assignment as part of your internship is to work with other staff to prepare a briefing book for the members of the joint committee. The briefing book will give them the necessary background for their initial work and help them understand the rudiments of how universal health care systems in other developed countries work. Because of your prior study and analytical prowess, you have been assigned the task of writing the first draft of a ‘policy brief’ that will layout succinctly the most important information for the joint committee. It will be up to you to shape the aspects of universal coverage that should be studied (comparing and contrasting these with what is currently done in the US), and, since the delegation cannot travel to all of the countries currently providing universal health care, to select 5 countries for an initial round of visits, and describing for each of the countries, what aspect of the care there would demonstrate an important dimension for the committee to observe.
In this simulated exercise you can assume that the members on the subcommittee have a general knowledge of the status of the US healthcare system so a brief recap of the most salient points in evaluating US health care is all that is needed in the introduction. The focus of the policy brief is to describe the comparison countries and select features that might be incorporated in the US.
Your policy brief should be written as a formal paper (following the style of the samples included in this module). It should be of sufficient length to cover the most important aspects of country approaches to universal health care. Although you are producing a document that will be objective in what it includes, you do have some autonomy in selecting, highlighting and supporting aspects of universal coverage that you feel are important. [The text also provides ‘evaluation standards of universal coverage’ and may guide you – portable and comprehensive benefits, geographically accessible care, affordable coverage, financial efficiency, and consumer choice.]
Please be certain that you cite and fully reference the sources of your information, including our text, following APA 6th ed. format. You do not need a cover page, though if you want to add a cover letter to the other staff – since you are writing the first draft of an important document that will go to the committee, please feel free.
Your paper length will be in the range of 8-10 pages.PreviousNext