HCS/455
05/28/13
Jay Littleton
The Policy Process In today’s health care system it is constantly improving and changing, due to the demands of the health care system. For this to happen new policies must be created or even improving old policies. Congress is involved in the process of policy making; including three stages such as foundation stage, legislative stage, and implementation stage. When a health care topic is in process of becoming a policy it hopes to reach a desired outcome to have a positive effect on people. In the policy making model it has its strengths and limitations. Its strength is the reduction of complexity of policy making to manageable. The limitations of the policy making model is the linearly of the model. It is viewed as the last stage of the model overlapping with first stage, “where each step is considered as temporally and functionally distinct” (Metagora, 1995). In the policy process there are many different models that explain the process. “One of the oldest and most common approaches to the study of policy- making derives from the early work of H. Lasswell (1951)”. H. Lasswell was an American political scientist who was known as the first to have taken into account and analyzed policy as a process. The most common model and the one H. Lasswell helped build is known as the stages model of policy. There are six stages within this model such as identification, agenda- setting, and adoption. But the most common stages would be the formulation stage, legislative stage, and the implementation stage. The formulation stage is the “formulation of policy proposals, their initiation and development, by policy planning organizations, interest groups, and/ or the executive or legislative branches of government” (Metagora, 1995). The next stage is the legislative stage, its where the “policy is codified into legislation and its standards are the same as the current