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
  North Carolina Rural Health Research and Policy Analysis Center
  Date: 09/2002
  This paper 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 advocacy more effective.