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In this paper we begin the inquiry into an congressional-interest group relationship and its impact on public policy looking at one example in health policy. We argue that Congress is in the driver?s seat in the relationship with interest groups and that it is in Members? best interest to take small, incremental policy steps, often seemingly against interest group preferences, with the idea that such actions will garner additional ?rent? from the groups in future years. Members simply don?t benefit adequately from ?solving? a problem; they benefit most from partially solving the problem (enough to take credit for solving it) but then quietly returning to the table at a later time when more interest group rent can be extracted. In this paper we analyze Medicare provider payments between 1997 and 2003?a time when the Congress first ?took away? resources from interests and then slowly gave them back as an example of how Congress can successfully extract rent and, with the help of groups, justify why their action is good public policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a new approach to cross national policy research that emphasizes systematic, quantitative comparisons of problem attention over time. This approach assumes that the challenges facing different regimes in an issue area such as health are often very similar. The comparative element investigates how the responses of different regimes affect the politics of the issue into the future. In this paper, we investigate health politics developments in two dissimilar systems, Denmark and the U.S. The health care issue presents both of these systems with common challenges and there are striking similarities in the development of health care politics in the two countries though the difference in the organization of health care systems has affected the exact content of health care politics. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]