One Nation, Uninsured
Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Every industrial nation in the world guarantees its citizens access to essential health care services--every country, that is, except the United States. In fact, one in eight Americans--a shocking 43 million people--do not have any health care insurance at all.
One Nation, Uninsured offers a vividly written history of America's failed efforts to address the health care needs of its citizens. Covering the entire twentieth century, Jill Quadagno shows how each attempt to enact national health insurance was met with fierce attacks by powerful stakeholders, who mobilized their considerable resources to keep the financing of health care out of the government's hands. Quadagno describes how at first physicians led the anti-reform coalition, fearful that government entry would mean government control of the lucrative private health care market. Doctors lobbied legislators, influenced elections by giving large campaign contributions to sympathetic candidates, and organized "grassroots" protests, conspiring with other like-minded groups to defeat reform efforts. As the success of Medicare and Medicaid in the mid-century led physicians and the AMA to start scaling back their attacks, the insurance industry began assuming a leading role against reform that continues to this day.
One Nation, Uninsured offers a sweeping history of the battles over health care. It is an invaluable read for anyone who has a stake in the future of America's health care system.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to Quadagno, the short answer to her subtitle is a fairly easy one: America lacks national health insurance because powerful interests have always managed to prevent Congress from passing the necessary legislation. As this slim history shows, however, those interest groups weren't always the obvious suspects. Although Quadagno, a sociologist and former presidential advisor, does write plenty about how organized physicians and insurance companies have lobbied to protect their interests over the last century, showing how the Clintons' disastrous attempt at health care reform is just the tip of the iceberg, she also offers insights into why labor unions rejected government-led solutions to the health care problem to focus on their own collective bargaining efforts. Other chapters detail conservative framing of national health care as "an insidious communist plot" and the fight southern doctors raised against the racial integration of medical facilities during the civil rights era. Quadagno unapologetically advocates for the sort of program that the United States has so far failed to adopt, but admits that it will never happen until health care is considered a "social right, not a consumer product." Her analysis of the repeated defeats is unlikely to find much traction with anyone besides the hardcore policy wonks, however, as her blow-by-blow accounts of the political battles fail to generate much heat.
