Acknowledgements About HSMC HSMC has been one of the leading UK centres for research, personal and organisational development in health care for nearly 40 years. Commissioning of healthcare and provision of healthcare outside hospitals have become specific areas of expertise in recent years, underpinned by a continuing commitment to issues of quality improvement and public and patient engagemen...

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines health as a "resource for everyday living, not the objective of living"; however, worldwide, there remains an unmistakable inequity in level of health and access to healthcare. The WHO has published documents on financing health systems towards universal health coverage [1], promoting healthy life [2], improving performance of health systems [3], and ...

Recent years have seen the rapid growth of private think tanks within the neoconservative movement that conduct "policy research" biased to their own agenda. This article provides an evidence-based rebuttal to a 2002 report by one such think tank, the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), which was intended to discredit 20 alleged myths about single-payer national health insu...

Thirty-five years ago, B.F. Skinner (1976) lamented a decreasing trend in the prevalence of cumulative records in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior ( JEAB). The editorial began with the two memorable lines, ‘‘Evidently we have not long to wait for an issue of JEAB without a single cumulative record! I shall not miss the records so much as the kinds of experiments that could s...