This Background Paper examines whether the agencies responsible for administering Federal environmental and health and safety laws have taken this concern for respiratory health to heart. This paper provides a partial response to the committees’ request for an assessment of noncancer health risks in the environment and follows OTA’s previous work on carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and immunotoxic substances.

This report discuses distance learning projects, and ways telecommunications technologies such as satellites, cable television, fiber optics, slow scan TV, instructional television fixed services, and microcomputer networking have opened up opportunities for school districts to coordinate schedules and to share resources.

Changes in how physicians and hospitals are paid have made individual consumers, health insurers, employers, and medical providers more sensitive to the cost implications of their decisions. At the same time, these policy changes have elevated the importance of having consumers be informed about the quality of medical providers. Purchasers of medical care (individual consumers, employers, health insurers) need to know about any differences in quality so that they can weigh quality along with cost in making decisions.

A study by the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) that looks at how information about Federal health programs is collected. Part 1 "inventories the different health data collection systems administered by the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and other Federal agencies" and Part 2 "is a directory of statutory provisions that govern the collection of health data by the Public Health Service and the Health Care Financing Administration" (p. iii).

This report responds to a request from the House Committee on interior and Insu- Iar Affairs to assess the ability of current mining and reclamation technologies and methodologies, and of Federal programs and policies, to meet the statutory mandates for environmental protection in reclaiming the surface of Western coal mined lands.

A study by the Office of Technology Assessment that examines the oil shale resources of the Western United States that could contribute to the liquid fuel supply of the United States.