Faculty

Colleen M. Grogan, Ph.D.

Coleen Grogan Colleen M. Grogan is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago. Her fields of special interest include health policy and health politics, the American welfare state, comparative state-level policy and politics, and empirical studies of participatory decisionmaking processes.

Professor Grogan has a forthcoming book with coauthor Michael Gusmano titled Healthy Voices/Unhealthy Silence: Advocacy and Health Policy for the Poor (Georgetown University Press). This book considers a central question: why do able advocates fight to participate in a deliberative advisory process, and choose not to publicly discuss topics of great concern?

Her second book project examines the political history of the Medicaid program-our largest health care program in the U.S. This book attempts to explain changes in legislation and political discourse over time, examines policy feedbacks within the program, and assesses Medicaid's potential to act as a stepping stone to universal coverage in the U.S.

Professor Grogan joined the SSA faculty in 1999 after serving as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale University, where she also held a joint appointment with the Institution for Social and Policy Studies. Prior to that she completed post-doctoral work at the University of California-Berkeley and conducted a year of independent study on urban health insurance reform in P.R. China. Professor Grogan graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a B.A. in Sociology, and earned a Ph.D. in Health Services Research and Policy from the University of Minnesota. She is a recipient of the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Investigator Award.

She has published broadly on issues of health policy and politics and U.S. health and welfare policies targeted at vulnerable populations. Recent publications include "Medicalization of Long-Term Care: Weighing the Risks" in The Handbook of Long-Term Care Administration and Policy;"A Marriage of Convenience: The History of Nursing Home Coverage and Medicaid" in Putting the Past Back In: History and Health Policy in the United States; "The Politics of Aging within Medicaid" in The New Politics of Old Age Policy; "Medicaid at the Crossroads" (with E. Patashnik) in Healthy, Wealthy and Fair: Health Care and the Good Society; and "Deliberative Democracy in Theory and Practice: Connecticut's Medicaid Managed Care Council" (with M.K. Gusmano) in State Politics & Policy Quarterly.