Virginia Gray

"And when the last Americano in the fullness of time follows the last Spaniard and the last red man into the shadows, this will still be the same poignantly unforgettable land of beauty, its arid mesas, canyons, and deserts lying perpetually beneath an ocean of pure light, and its Sky Gods still pouring frugally from their ollas, their violet-soft rain." -Ross Calvin, "Sky Determines""These houses and the people who inhabit them are scattered through 5000 square miles of solitude in the Southwest's high desert. Most of them don't know each other and are meeting for the first time in this book. I see them together as a vanguard consciousness, loners in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a jeep road, or dug into a hill. Only the sun can find them. Their houses are self-portraits, ranging from rudimentary to sophisticated. Any resemblances come more from the prevailing powers of mud, space and spirit than from an exchange of personal inspiration." -Noel Young, from the forewordThis book is also available from Echo Point Books as a paperback (ISBN 1648371078).

"And when the last Americano in the fullness of time follows the last Spaniard and the last red man into the shadows, this will still be the same poignantly unforgettable land of beauty, its arid mesas, canyons, and deserts lying perpetually beneath an ocean of pure light, and its Sky Gods still pouring frugally from their ollas, their violet-soft rain." -Ross Calvin, "Sky Determines""These houses and the people who inhabit them are scattered through 5000 square miles of solitude in the Southwest's high desert. Most of them don't know each other and are meeting for the first time in this book. I see them together as a vanguard consciousness, loners in the middle of nowhere, at the end of a jeep road, or dug into a hill. Only the sun can find them. Their houses are self-portraits, ranging from rudimentary to sophisticated. Any resemblances come more from the prevailing powers of mud, space and spirit than from an exchange of personal inspiration." -Noel Young, from the forewordThis book is also available from Echo Point Books as a hardcover (ISBN 164837106X).

Universal health care was on the national political agenda for nearly a hundred years until a comprehensive (but not universal) health care reform bill supported by President Obama passed in 2010. The most common explanation for the failure of past reform efforts is that special interests were continually able to block reform by lobbying lawmakers. Yet, beginning in the 1970s, accelerating with the failure of the Clinton health care plan, and continuing through the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, health policy reform was alive and well at the state level. Interest Groups and Health Care Reform across the United States assesses the impact of interest groups to determine if collectively they are capable of shaping policy in their own interests or whether they influence policy only at the margins. What can this tell us about the true power of interest groups in this policy arena? The fact that state governments took action in health policy in spite of opposing interests, where the national government could not, offers a compelling puzzle that will be of special interest to scholars and students of public policy, health policy, and state politics.