Recent orders
Social Policy and Aging, Spring Semester 2022
Social Policy and Aging, Spring Semester 2022
Study Questions:
What is meant by the concept of tradeoffs? How are tradeoffs useful for thinking about social policy in general? What about social policy and aging?
Numeracy: What do we mean by confusion of the inverse?
Suppose you have a very accurate diagnostic test, meaning the probability of a positive test for someone who has the disease is high and the probability of a negative test for someone who doesn’t have the disease is also high. What can you conclude about the probability that someone has the disease if they test positive? How does disease prevalence factor into your assessment?
How do we define age and old age in policy?
How does an aging population affect policy? How does policy affect aging?
What dilemmas or value constructs do we consider in aging policy?
What do the three branches of the federal government do? Who leads them?
What are the differences between politics and policy?
What’s the difference between macro, mezzo, and micro policy?
What are checks and balances?
Explain Birkland’s Stages Model of the Policy Process?
What makes a problem a public problem? Give an example.
What is a policy window of opportunity?
What’s an agenda? How does agenda setting work? How do issues reach agendas?
Define Baby Boomers and Their Ages in 2030 and 2050. Why do we care?
What were the Great Society reforms?
What programs that we have discussed this semester were part of the Great Society reforms?
What is the Older Americans Act?
When was it passed?
What other big social policy programs were passed at the same time?
Who is served by the OAA? How are they served?
What is federalism? How does federalism work?
What is an entitlement program?
How do entitlement/mandatory programs impact the federal budget? Are they a small or large share of the budget?
What are some examples of entitlement programs?
Why do people value insurance? What does it do?
In what cases do people not value insurance?
What is moral hazard in insurance?
What is ex-post vs. ex-ante moral hazard?
How do insurance plans try to manage moral hazard?
What is adverse selection in insurance?
How does adverse selection affect the functioning of insurance markets?
How do insurance plans try to manage adverse selection?
What is social insurance?
Why do governments often intervene in insurance markets? What is the primary rationale for government intervention in insurance markets?
What are the 3 broad types of health care system models commonly seen in industrialized countries?
What characterizes the US health care system?
What is Medicaid?
Whom does it serve?
Why/how is Medicaid relevant for seniors?
How was the Medicaid program affected by the ACA?
In what key ways does Medicaid differ from private health insurance?
What are some potential issues with this program?
What is Medicare?
Whom does it serve?
What is the difference between traditional Medicare and Medicare Advantage?
How does Medicare manage adverse selection?
What are potential issues with these programs?
What are the three broad goals of the ACA?
How did the ACA affect public vs. private health insurance?
How does the ACA try to mitigate adverse selection in private insurance? What is the three-legged stool of health care reform?
What is Social Security?
What is the government’s reason for running this program?
Who does the program serve?
What does pay as you go mean?
How has the program changed over time?
What are potential issues with the program?
What are common approaches to reforming the program?
What is meant by “in the labor force” vs. “not in the labor force”? What does the unemployment rate capture? What are “discouraged workers”?
How have rates of “in the labor force” vs. “not in the labor force” changed among older workers over time?
What are some reasons these rates may have changed?
What is age discrimination in employment? Is there any evidence of age discrimination in employment?
What is the Age Discrimination in Employment Act?
How does an aging population affect the labor force? How is the labor market affected by an aging population?
What is retirement? How do we measure it?
Heredity and hormones are things that affect all of us
Check Point
Heredity and Hormones
University of Phoenix
Heredity and hormones are things that affect all of us. We are all shaped by things in life we experience and how we react to these experiences can be traced back to heredity and hormones. Heredity and hormones affect the way our behavior develops and how we react to situations. Both nature and how we were nurtured affects each one of us differently. I plan to discuss a few ideas I feel shape how we develop and first of will be the endocrine system. The second topic will be hormones and identify them and the glands responsible for secreting them. I will also cover heredity also known as behavior genetics and the evolution of psychology.
The endocrine system is the system of glands, each of which secretes a type of hormone directly into the bloodstream to regulate the body. The endocrine system is an information signal system like the nervous system, yet its effects and mechanism are different. The endocrine system’s effects are slow to initiate, and prolonged in their response, lasting from a few hours up to weeks.
Hormones are substances (chemical mediators) released from endocrine tissue into the bloodstream where they travel to target tissue and generate a response. Hormones regulate various human functions, including metabolism, growth and development, tissue function, and mood. Features of endocrine glands are, in general, their ductless nature, their vascularity, and usually the presence of intracellular vacuoles or granules storing their hormones. In contrast, exocrine glands, such as salivary glands, sweat glands, and glands within the gastrointestinal tract, tend to be much less vascular and have ducts or a hollow lumen.
Heredity is like the foundation of a building with all the piping intact but none of the structure yet. It has all the possibility but nothing has been realized and actualized. Behavioral genetics is the field of study that examines the role of genetics in animal (including human) behavior. Often associated with the “nature versus nurture” debate, behavioral genetics is highly interdisciplinary, involving contributions from biology, genetics, ethology, psychology, and statistics. Behavioral geneticists study the inheritance of behavioral traits. In humans, this information is often gathered through the use of the twin study or adoption study.
In conclusion the human body is very complex and each one develops in many different ways depending on what traits were inherited and how their body reacts to the hormones. People all develop differently because each one of us reacts in a unique to life and what they experience. Furthermore our bodies produce hormones differently and react to them in specific ways.
References:
Understanding Psychology: Chapter 2
Social Policy Analysis of Social Welfare
Social Policy Analysis of Social Welfare
A social problem is an issue that relates to a perception of the society of a personal life of an individual. This perception can be a condition that the people of the society view as undesirable. This can include unmet human needs like health care, unemployment, poor housing and many others. A social problem affects most members of the society either directly or indirectly. For example, in the event of high unemployment rate of youth, they are directly affected due to poverty while the larger community is indirectly affected since they have to rely on them for survival. The larger community is also directly affected when the situation gets out of hand the unemployed youth turn to crime and violence as a result. The government is also affected since t has to invest its resources to curb the insecurity that arise from the unemployed youth. This leads to diversion of development funds to issues of combating crime. The aforementioned example of unemployment is an example of how individuals, families, communities and the society are affected by a social problem. It is difficult to pinpoint the causes of social problem distinctively since what causes a social problem in one society could not be causing a social problem in another. Some of these causes could be feeble mindedness of individuals in a society, immobility, weak social institutions, and industrialization. Inequality in the society may also cause social problems in the society.
The main goal of social welfare policy is to maintain the well-being of the society. A policy on social welfare is a collective response to the social problems. The objectives of social welfare would be to eradicate a social problem or to ignore it all together. The social policy should promote the general welfare of the public. The social worker should be aware of the political arena on practice and should advocate for change in policy and legislation to improve social conditions in order to meet the basic human needs and promote social justice. In the short-term, a social welfare policy aims at addressing the challenges that emanate from a social problem while in the long-term the policy aims at investing in changing the status quo that cause the social problem. With these, the short-term and the long-term goals of a social welfare policy support the main result of the policy.
The main benefit of a social welfare policy is the solutions that are realized by successfully implementing it. For instance jobs can be created; income generated etc. hence fighting poverty. A social welfare policy covers the individuals or places that are affected by the presence of a social problem. To identify the group of people to be eligible of the social welfare policy, a policy could select individuals as per their economic class, region or settlement. For the success of a social welfare policy, both the government and donors finance it. The administration of the policy is dependent on the mode of implementation or the initiator. The government can implement a social policy if it is under its constitutional mandate or through a collaboration of the civil society. The civil society can also implement a social welfare policy if the government fails to. The strengths of the social welfare policies are access to universal healthcare; the government takes good care to its citizens and improves their welfare. The weakness of the social welfare policies is that there are higher taxes charged to facilitate the policy, reduces competitiveness among the citizens while the universal welfare drains the economy. As well the social welfare if checks are not put it increases the dependency syndrome.
To improve a social welfare policy, there is need to conduct a research to highlight the weaknesses in the policy and assess the adversities that the policy causes. Theswe will help the policy makers in making adjustment in the social welfare policy so as to address the social problem amicably.