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The study assesses public health programs to shed light on the experiences of low-income and minority women with children seeking health services. Thirteen focus groups were conducted with 111 pregnant women or women with children. Women consumers of public health services experience difficulties accessing health services due to a lack of insurance, information and language barriers about programs and eligibility, a shortage of Medicaid providers and specialist services, long waits, bureaucratic barriers, and dismissive treatment. Accessibility and information barriers were more prominent in rural regions whereas bureaucratic barriers were more pronounced in urban areas. Lower satisfaction with services was reported among ethnic minority women compared to whites.

The Edmund Edelman Children’s Court is a juvenile dependency courthouse in Los Angeles designed with bright murals, open play spaces, and modified courtrooms to be “child-sensitive” and “family-friendly.” Through a recounting of the political and cultural forces at play building up to its construction, I argue that the decisions to build a “child-sensitive” court confirm the carceral containment of the culpable black adult. This article represents an inquiry into the cultural logic of the court’s construction, revealing the relationship between raced constructions of innocence and guilt. This study draws from five months of fieldwork conducted in the Edelman Children’s Court.

This chapter explores the multifaceted present-day social and cultural constructions of adolescence in a Nordic Atlantic society, the Faroe Islands. Based on young people’s perspectives and narratives, this chapter delves into the transition from youthhood to adulthood in the context of a small-scale, family-oriented society in shift. Drawing on sociological theoretical writing about “waiting” and “waithood” in relation to the (often temporally extended or delayed) transition from adolescence to full adulthood in a globalizing world, as well as social anthropological studies of future-making, my aim is to outline the new futural orientations of contemporary adolescence with focus on aspirations for work and family life. Young people, the chapter argues, are waiting and navigating in a society with multiple parallel temporalities: When to marry? When to get children? When to earn your own money and have your own home? These and many other questions define waithood in contemporary society, which is characterized by an increasingly precarious avenue toward promising futures resonating the socially accepted ways of performing adulthood. In the Faroe Islands, an island society with roughly 54,000 inhabitants, young people’s waiting is very often also a question of staying or leaving, that is, mobility and migration strategies. The waiting entails pace as a strategy for the future (Eisenstein, 2021). Adolescent islanders aim to “hit the right pace” in their future imaginaries. This chapter contributes to sociological discussions on the social construction of adolescence with focus on the meaning of time and temporalities. It relies on empirical material from extensive qualitative studies in the Faroe Islands.

This essay situates the significance of “spiritual capital” within Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) in relation to re-enchantment theories of modernity. It argues that the merging of spiritual and economic values has engendered a form of “spiritualized materialism” that has turned sheer economic prosperity into spiritually wrought rewards. Within this moral economy, matter does not simply function as a conduit for the sacred; it actually constitutes the very idea of the sacred. In comparison to recent work on corporate attempts to fuse religious ethics with business, this essay is noteworthy in that it unravels the logic and effect of such fusions at the vernacular religious level.

A personal narrative of my escape with my mother and siblings from South Sudan as refugees is presented. The narrative then chronicles the time in Egypt applying for refugee status and eventual resettlement in the United States. In the United States, resettlement began in Newark, New Jersey. I then document my move from Newark to San Diego, California to, eventually, New York City. In New York my life as a model, DJ, actress, and founder of Stand for Education is narrated.

This research explores how families coming off of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), the national cash welfare program, plan for their health insurance after their automatic benefits expire. Data were collected in focus groups in rural communities and small towns in Oregon. Respondents reported that topics related to health insurance or planning for health insurance are not components of any welfare-to work curriculum, nor are they part of routine conversations with caseworkers. Many respondents reported that we were the first ones to raise these issues with them. Consequently, they had done virtually no planning for when their transitional Medicaid expires despite their serious concerns about access to health care and their previous negative experiences with being uninsured.

The Norwegian health care system is semi-decentralized. Primary care and long-term care (LTC) are the responsibilities of the municipalities. Specialist care is the responsibility of the central government and is organised through four Regional Health Authorities (RHA). Resource use, health outcomes and severity are the three main pillars for priority setting, regularly applied in reimbursement decisions for pharmaceuticals.

The sustainability of health care is challenged in Norway. The main factors are a growing elderly population with high need of complex, coordinated services, an increasing demand for newly approved drugs and advanced technology and a potential shortage of health care personnel.

We present recent trials and policy reforms in Norway aimed at improving care pathways combined with cost containment. Reforms in the pharmaceutical market, both with regard to market access and reimbursement (cost-effectiveness), and regulation of prices, have resulted in cost containment. The primary care sector awaits reform initiatives to recruit and retain physicians as general practitioners. No reform in the hospital sector has had cost containment as a main focus. The sector is characterized with low productivity growth, and expenditures that have increased more than the GDP growth. Waiting times are long, and coordination between sub-sectors of health care has been poor, although the Coordination reform of 2012 has alleviated some of the challenges related to intersectoral coordination. Still, the divided responsibility for health care between the central government and the municipalities creates tensions between national ambitions and local decisions in the financing and provision of health services.

Behavioral economics poses a challenge for the welfare evaluation of choices, particularly those that involve risk. It demands that we recognize that the descriptive account of behavior toward those choices might not be the ones we were all taught, and still teach, and that subjective risk perceptions might not accord with expert assessments of probabilities. In addition to these challenges, we are faced with the need to jettison naive notions of revealed preferences, according to which every choice by a subject expresses her objective function, as behavioral evidence forces us to confront pervasive inconsistencies and noise in a typical individual’s choice data. A principled account of errant choice must be built into models used for identification and estimation. These challenges demand close attention to the methodological claims often used to justify policy interventions. They also require, we argue, closer attention by economists to relevant contributions from cognitive science. We propose that a quantitative application of the “intentional stance” of Dennett provides a coherent, attractive and general approach to behavioral welfare economics.