Rural Health Research Gateway

Arguing for Rural Health: Justice and Fairness in Advocating for Rural Health Policy

Funder: Office of Rural Health Policy (ORHP)
Research center: North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center
Phone: 919.966.5541
Lead researcher: Thomas C. Ricketts, PhD , 919.966.5541, tom_ricketts@unc.edu
Project completed:June 2002
Topic: Health policy

The development of policy for rural health care in the United States has occurred in a reactive manner. Within rural health advocacy, there little attention has been paid to the structure of the arguments that are presented, however logical or effective they are. The basic research question to be answered in this project is "how can arguments for or against special treatment of rural communities best be structured?" The approach to answering this question will be to explore the currently used justifications and arguments and compare them to other, similar or related arguments. This will be accomplished by a focused literature review that uses the concepts of advocacy, interest group politics, justice, ethics, frontier, rural, health, and policy as the central search terms and concepts. An alternative approach to arguing for rural health will then be proposed.

Publications

  • Arguing for Rural Health in Medicare: A Progressive Rhetoric for Rural America
    Author(s): Thomas Ricketts
    Date: 09 / 2002
    Examines how rural health policy is treated in the broader field of public policy, discusses the role of advocacy in developing rural health policy, and suggests ways to make that advocacy more effective. Specifically, the report explores the types of claims that rural advocates make, focusing in the context of Medicare policy, and determines to what extent those claims reflect a central them of fairness and inclusiveness in national polices versus claims that benefit special interests.