Comprehensive Review: Mass Media, Political Parties, and Health Systems Administration

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering mass media consumption, bias, and effects; political party organization, history, and polarization; and health administration financing, delivery structures, and metrics.

News Desert

A geographic area or community with no local news organization, or where the local news outlet is severely endangered, leaving residents with limited or no reliable source of local news (affecting approximately $1/5$ of the U.S. population across $7\%$ of counties).

Watch List County

A county identified as being at imminent risk of losing its only remaining local news source.

Hostile Media Effect

The perceptual phenomenon in which partisans or individuals with strong political convictions view neutral or balanced news reporting as unfairly biased against their own viewpoint.

Agenda Setting

The media's capacity to influence which issues the public and policymakers view as significant by selectively increasing the frequency and prominence of coverage given to specific topics.

Priming

The media effect of directing public focus toward specific topics or criteria, which citizens then give disproportionate weight to when evaluating political leaders and institutions.

Framing

The manner in which news media structure and contextualize a story or issue, thereby guiding how the public interprets its causes and implications (such as characterizing poverty as personal failure versus economic recession).

Accuracy Nudge

A behavioral intervention or prompt intended to encourage social media users to evaluate the veracity of content prior to sharing, designed to mitigate the spread of misinformation.

Media Consolidation

The concentration of media ownership among a diminishing number of corporate conglomerates through mergers and acquisitions (e.g., Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery; Disney and 20th Century Fox).

Infotainment

News coverage engineered to blend factual information with sensationalism and entertainment techniques in order to capture viewer attention and maximize commercial advertising revenues.

AllSides Media Bias Chart

A media rating chart that evaluates online U.S. political content on a perspective spectrum ranging from Left, Lean Left, Center, Lean Right, to Right, reflecting viewpoint rather than accuracy or credibility.

Political Party

A group organized to nominate candidates, compete for political power through elections, and promote specific ideas about public policies across electoral, governing, and ideological arenas.

Network Party Organization

An organizational model representing American political parties not as top-down hierarchies, but as decentralized networks of candidate campaigns, national committees, donors, interest groups, and state and local committees lacking a single chain of command.

Party Identification

An individual's psychological sense of belonging or attachment to a political party, commonly evaluated in the United States along a $7$-point scale ranging from strong Democrat to strong Republican.

Leaners

Self-described political independents who indicate that, while not formally registered or identified with a party, they feel closer to either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party.

Political Ideology

A coherently structured set of beliefs concerning the fundamental nature of a good society and the legitimate role government should play in achieving it.

The 'Big Sort'

The demographic thesis that Americans are increasingly migrating into geographically clustered communities of culturally and politically like-minded people, resulting in higher concentrations of landslide electoral counties.

New Deal Party Era

The party era spanning $1932\text{--}1968$, initiated by Franklin D. Roosevelt, defined by an expanding federal role in the economy and sustained Democratic dominance in which Democrats won $7$ of $9$ presidential elections.

Transitional Era

The party era spanning $1968\text{--}1996$, characterized by frequent divided government, the fracture of the New Deal coalition, the Southern Realignment, and the migration of religious conservatives toward the Republican Party.

Polarization Era

The modern party era beginning in $1996$, marked by ideological divergence, heightened hostility between parties, close national elections, and an aversion to bipartisan compromise.

Negative Partisanship

A political dynamic where voter alignment, intensity, and behavior are motivated primarily by animosity, fear, or negative perceptions of the rival party rather than devotion to one's own party.

Proportional Representation

An electoral system in which legislative seats are allocated to political parties in direct proportion to the percentage of the total popular vote each party secures.

Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC)

An institutional long-term care setting that provides multiple levels of care (independent living, assisted living, and skilled nursing facilities) in a single consolidated environment as residents age.

Deductible

A health insurance cost-sharing provision requiring the insured person to pay a specified dollar amount out of pocket annually before insurance coverage begins paying benefits.

Risk Sharing (with Providers)

A managed care arrangement where financial risk for over-utilization or service costs is transferred in part to healthcare providers to incentivize cost-conscious clinical decisions.

Average Length of Stay (ALOS)

A hospital administrative metric calculated by dividing total patient days by total admissions, used as an indicator of severity of illness and inpatient capacity utilization.

Nonprofit Healthcare Organization

A tax-exempt organization legally permitted to generate an operating profit/surplus, provided that all earnings are reinvested into institutional operations and community service rather than distributed to private owners.

Medicare Part A

The Medicare benefit program that provides coverage for inpatient hospital services, short-term stays in skilled nursing facilities, home health care, and hospice care.

Horizontal Integration

A healthcare growth strategy wherein an organization expands its geographic footprint or operational capacity by acquiring or merging with facilities providing the same core service (such as a chain of nursing homes).

Fee-for-Service (FFS) Reimbursement

A retrospective payment mechanism where healthcare services are billed, unbundled, and reimbursed as separate, distinct individual units of service delivered to the patient.

Prospective Reimbursement

A payment methodology in which reimbursement rates are fixed in advance of service delivery, exerting financial discipline on providers to deliver efficient care within pre-set limits.

Retrospective Reimbursement

A reimbursement system where payment is established after medical services are delivered based on costs incurred, historically criticized for driving up expenditures by rewarding service volume.

Activities of Daily Living (ADLs)

A standardized set of basic self-care tasks (including eating, dressing, bathing, and mobility); substantial loss of ADL function indicates a need for institutional skilled nursing home care.

Occupancy Rate

The percentage of operational hospital beds occupied by patients over a defined period, calculated using: $\text{Occupancy Rate} = \left(\frac{\text{Average Daily Census}}{\text{Available Beds}}\right) \times 100$.