Behavioral health's challenge to academic, scientific, and professional psychology.

In 1964 President Lyndon Johnson, first threatening and next fully using the power of the federal purse, informed this country’s scientific and university professional manpower training communities that federal health-related funds should be used to support fewer basic and theoretical and more applied and practical research and training activities. The 1964 Congress and its successors, and Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter, all endorsed this demand that our scientific and teaching institutions refocus their priorities and begin to pay more attention to the human (and the ever-increasing financial) costs associated with the health of our citizens. Before proceeding to discuss these annually escalating financial and human costs and what might be done by psychologists and others to help reduce them, fairness requires that the many legitimate financial costs be excluded from the criticism that follows. Health care in the United States is expensive in part because our citizens, speaking, themselves or through third-party payers, have opted to pay for intensive care and renal dialysis units in hospitals,