James S. House, Ph.D. is Angus Campbell Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Survey Research, Public Policy, and Sociology, and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Academy of Sciences.

He received his B.A. in History (minor in Psychology) from Haverford College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1972. From 1970 through 1978 he was on the faculty of the Sociology Department at Duke University, and an adjunct faculty member of the Department of Epidemiology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He returned to the University of Michigan in 1978 with a joint faculty appointment in the Survey Research Center of the Institute for Social Research and Department of Sociology, and research affiliations with the Department of Epidemiology of the School of Public Health and the Institute of Gerontology. In 2008 he joined the faculty of Michigan's Ford School of Public Policy.

His research career has focused on the role of social and psychological factors in the etiology and course of health and illness, initially on occupational stress and health, then social relationships and support in relation to health, and currently on the role of psychosocial factors in understanding and alleviating social disparities in health and the way health changes with age. He has also made theoretical and empirical contributions to interdisciplinary social psychology, particularly from a sociological perspective, and taught courses in social psychology, social determinants and disparities in health, and applications of these to social policy.

Over his career, House has been founding Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator of the Americans' Changing Lives (ACL) study, the Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) study, and the Chicago Community Adult Health Study (CCAHS). He also has served as Chair of the Department of Sociology (1986-90) and Director of the Survey Research Center in the Institute for Social Research, all at the University of Michigan.

Most recently, at the University of Michigan's Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy House has offered courses relating socioeconomic policy and health policy. Recently Professor House co-edited Social and Economic Policy as Health Policy: Rethinking America's Approach to Improving Health (with Robert Schoeni and others) and A Telescope on Society: Survey Research & Social Science at the University of Michigan and Beyond. He has authored several earlier books and over 100 journal articles and research reports.

His new book -- Beyond Obamacare: Life Death and Social Policy -- will be published by the Russell Sage Foundation in June, 2015.

New Book

Beyond Obamacare:

Life, Death, and Social Policy

Health care spending in the United States today is approaching 20 percent of GDP, yet levels of U.S. population health have been declining for decades relative to other wealthy and even some developing nations. How is it possible that the U.S., which spends more than any other nation on health care and insurance, now has a population markedly less healthy than those of many other nations? Sociologist and public health expert James S. House analyzes this paradoxical crisis, offering surprising new explanations for how and why the U.S. has fallen into this trap. In Beyond Obamacare, House shows that health care reforms, including the Affordable Care Act, cannot resolve this crisis because they do not focus on the underlying causes for the nation�s poor health outcomes, which are largely social, economic, environmental, psychological, and behavioral.

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