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2008 Panels and Business Meeting

2008 Business Meeting need update

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• Join the Committee's mailing list
• The committee sponors panels at the yearly meetings of the American Political Science Association:
• 1996
• 1998
• 1999
• 2000
• APSA's Proceedings (copies of papers for the latest annual meeting from August just before the meeting through the following July)
• 2001
• 2002
• 2003
• 2004
• 2005  
• 2006 
• 2007
  

• Newsletters:  1999       2000       2004
• June 2007 Newsletter
• January 2008 Newsletter
  
• Working Group in Health Politics
  
• Journal of Health Policy, Politics and Law
• Health Policy Links for Research and Data
• Syllabi
• Conferences
• Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholars in Health Policy Research Program (up to 12 scholars, who will work at Harvard Univ., the Univ of Michigan, or the University of California, Berkeley) for up to two years - must have received PhD in the last five years).  
  

The origins of the Committee on Health Politics (COHP) can be traced back to the late 1960s. In 1969 a conference was held at the Harvard School of Public Health. The focus of the conference was the neglect of health care issues in the political science community, especially in the light of recent works on the subject by economists. Included in the group were Ralph Straetz, Ted Marmor, and Mathew Holden. Ralph Straetz at New York University had a federal mental health grant that trained political scientists. Harvard and some other schools of public health also had post-doctoral fellowships that helped to support political scientists who were pursuing research on health policy issues. 

In the early 1970s Straetz circulated a newsletter, and he began to sponsor a breakfast meeting of the group at the American Political Science Association (APSA). Members also sometimes met at the American Public Health Association Annual Meeting. These activities helped to mold a community of political scientists who became important figures in the health policy research community of the late 1970s and 1980s. 

By 1975 members of the COHP decided that a journal devoted to the publication of articles on health policy would stimulate other social scientists to conduct research and write in the field.. This led to the formation of the Journal of Health Politics, Policy, and Law, which published its first issue in 1976. 

The COHP has continued to meet each year at the APSA. It is an unaffiliated group of the APSA, and currently sponsors three or four panels each year at the APSA Annual Meeting. Membership is free, and anyone with an interest in health policy is invited to be a member. There are currently about two hundred people on the mailing list. About fifty people annually attend the lunch business meeting of the COHP. 

Webmasters: 

• Jim Brasfield, Department of Political Science, Webster University, 470 E. Lockwood, St. Louis, Missouri 63119 brasfijm@websteruniv.edu and
• Ted Anagnoson, Department of Political Science, California State University, Los Angeles, CA 90032-8226 anag999@silcom.com