Remedy and Reaction; The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform
Chris Vulaggio (author photograph) and Ilene MacDo New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. xii, 324 pages. Notes. Index. Signed by the author on the title page. Underlining noted. Paul Starr is the Stuart Professor of communications and public affairs at Princeton. He also serves as founding co-editor of The American Prospect, a liberal magazine that he co-founded in 1990 with Robert Kuttner and Robert Reich. Professor Starr's work addresses a wide range of questions in politics, public policy, and social theory. During 1993 he served as a senior health policy advisor at the White House. Professor Starr has written three books about health care institutions and policies. The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1983) won the Bancroft Prize (American History), C. Wright Mills Award (Sociology), and Pulitzer Prize (General Nonfiction). The Logic of Health Care Reform (1992) laid out the case for a system of universal health insurance provided through a choice of private plans in what are now called insurance exchanges. His most recent book on healthcare history and politics is Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health-Care Reform (2011). Professor Starr has also written extensively on media, the public, and liberalism. His 2004 book The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications received the Goldsmith Book Prize. Freedom's Power (2007) is an account of both the philosophical and institutional development of liberalism from its classical to modern phases. His most recent book, Entrenchment, is about the entrenchment of of wealth and power, and of constitutional limits on concentrated power and privilege. In no other country has health care served as such a volatile flashpoint of ideological conflict. America has endured a century of rancorous debate on health insurance, and despite the passage of legislation in 2010, the battle is not yet over. This book is a history of how and why the United States became so stubbornly different in health care, presented by an expert with unsurpassed knowledge of the issues. Tracing healthcare reform from its beginnings to its current uncertain prospects, Paul Starr argues that the United States ensnared itself in a trap through policies that satisfied enough of the public and so enriched the healthcare industry as to make the system difficult to change. He reveals the inside story of the rise and fall of the Clinton health plan in the early 1990s and of the Gingrich counterrevolution that followed. And he explains the curious tale of how Mitt Romney's reforms in Massachusetts became a model for Democrats and then follows both the passage of those reforms under Obama and the explosive reaction they elicited from conservatives. Writing concisely and with an even hand, the author offers exactly what is needed as the debate continues, a penetrating account of how health care became such treacherous terrain in American politics. Condition: Good / Very good.
Keywords: Health Care, Health Insurance, Comprehensive Reform, Clinton Health Plan, Gingrich, Entitlements, Mitt Romney, Climate Legislation, Affordable Care Act, Federalism
ISBN: 9780300171099
[Book #84904]
Price: $50.00