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Sue Tolleson-Rinehart, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, suetr@unc.edu
James Brasfield, Webster University, brasfijm@webster.edu

The 2009 Annual Meeting, in Toronto, is an especially appropriate setting for the inaugural panels of the Health Politics and Policy Organized Section, as is the theme of Change and Complexity in the Contemporary Era. Progress in medical science and expansions of policy have combined in recent decades to lead the delivery of health care through some of the greatest change, and largest increases in complexity, of any human system. Our attempts to decipher the complexity and map the change have always profited from comparative analysis.

We define health politics and policy broadly. As the last decades of the twentieth century came to a close, the global community had achieved consensus on implicit or explicit recognition of access to safe, effective, high quality health care as a human right, and a public good. Indeed, many go further and claim health itself as a right. We hope in the coming years to build a large number of panels reflecting the breadth implied in these perspectives.

For our inaugural panels, we welcome paper proposals on all topics, using all methods. We are particularly interested in papers that address three great themes: the politics of health care reform, comparative health politics and policy, and defining health politics and policy - elucidating its most useful analytical constructs, contextual approaches, and methods. We hope, depending on the proposals we receive, to construct a Theme Panel on "Health System Complexity and Change: Measuring the Politics of Delivering Care."