A brief text presenting conflicts and controversies surrounding social welfare policy. This book is part of the Connecting Core Competencies Series. This series helps students understand and master CSWE's core competencies with a variety of pedagogy highlighted competency content and critical thinking questions for the competencies throughout. Essentials of Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy (a briefer version of Social Welfare: Politics and Public Policy, 7/e) introduces the major social welfare policies and programs in the United States and encourages readers to think about conflicts in social welfare today. It emphasizes the current political aspects of policymaking and major social welfare programs. In this book, social welfare policy is portrayed as the ever-evolving result of public conflict over social problems, the resources Americans choose to allocate to those problems, the debate over whether these problems can best be solved through government, and the political choices involved in reaching even tentative consensus. Teaching & Learning Experience Improve Critical Thinking -- Includes critical thinking questions in margins and end of chapter review questions that 'build' on each other. Explore Current Issues -- Includes the most recent data on healthcare reform, the midterm elections, and public policy changes, and more. Apply CSWE Core Competencies -- Integrates the 2008 CSWE EPAS throughout -- highlights competencies and practice behaviors and includes expensive pedagogy. Support Instructors -- An Instructor's Manual and Test Bank, Computerized Test Bank (MyTest), Blackboard Test Item File, and PowerPoint presentations are included in the outstanding supplements package. Editorial Reviews About the Author Diana DiNitto is Cullen Trust Centennial Professor of Alcohol Studies and Education and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where she teaches courses in social welfare policy, alcohol and drug problems, research, and pedagogy. She has a MSW degree and a Ph.D. in government from Florida State University. She has worked in a detoxification center, halfway house, and outpatient chemical dependency treatment program. She is also coauthor of Chemical Dependency: A Systems Approach, 4th ed. (Pearson, Summer 2011) and Social Work: Issues and Opportunities in a Challenging Profession, 3rd ed. (Lyceum Books, 2008). Her research in on substance abuse, violence against women, and social welfare policy. Dr. DiNitto has served on the boards of the Council and Social Work Education, the Association of Medical Education and Research on Substance Abuse, and the Texas Research Society on Alcoholism. She currently chairs the NASW Press Book Committee. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Sydney (Australia). Recently she gave the Robert J. O'Leary Memorial Lecture at Ohio State University entitled "Ending America's Ambivalence in the War on Drugs" and presented invited testimony on drug policy to the United States Sentencing Commission. David H. Johnson is Assistant Professor of Social Work at Millersville University of Pennsylvania where he teaches courses in social welfare policy and law, social welfare policy and economics, human behavior in the social environment, social work practice, research methods, and mediation. He has a MSW degree from the University of Southern Mississippi and a Ph.D. in Social Work from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to social work, he spent more than two decades in the public sector including several years of progressive responsibilities in the health insurance industry. He received honorable mention for the 2010 Dissertation Award of the Society for Social Work and Research for his dissertation A Structure by No Means Complete: A Comparison of the Successful Passage of Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Baines Johnson with the Failure to Pass National Healthcare Reform under William Jefferson Clinton. His research is in social welfare policy, substance abuse, and HIV/AIDS. He has direct practice experience in child welfare and homelessness, as well as research experience with the Health Behavior Research and Training Institute at the University of Texas at Austin Center for Social Work Research. He has served on the boards of the NASW-Mississippi Chapter Board of Directors, the Balance of State Continuum of Care, and AIDS Services Coalition. He currently serves on the NASW-Pennsylvania Chapter Public Policy Committee and the Lancaster County Medical Foundation Board of Directors.