Theodore R. R. Marmor
On July 30, 1965, President Johnson flew to Independence, Missouri to sign the Medicare bill. The new statute included two related insurance programs to finance substantial portions of the hospital and physician expenses incurred by Americans over the age of sixty-five. Public attempts to improve American health standards have typically precipitated bitter debate, even as the issue has shifted from the professional and legal status of physicians to the availability of hospital care and public health programs. In The Politics of Medicare, Marmor helps the reader understand Medicare's origins, and he interprets the history of the program and explores what happened to Medicare politically as it turned from a legislative act in the mid-1960s to a major program of American government in the three decades since. This is a vibrant study of an important piece of legislation that asks and answers several questions: How could the American political system yield a policy that simultaneously appeased anti-governmental biases and used the federal government to provide a major entitlement? How was the American Medical Association legally overcome yet placated enough to participate in the program? And how did the Medicare law emerge so enlarged from earlier proposals that themselves had caused so much controversy?
I: The Origins And Enactments; 1: The Origins of the Medicare Strategy; 2: The Politics of Legislative Impossibility; 3: The Politics of Legislative Possibility; 4: The Politics of Legislative Certainty; 5: Medicare and the Analysis of Social Policy in American Politics; 6: Legislation to Operation; II: The Politics of Medicare: 1966–99; 7: Medicare´s Politics: 1966-90; 8: The Politics of Medicare Reform in the 1990s: Budget Struggles, National Health Reform, and Shifting Conflicts; 9: The Ideological Context of Medicare´s Politics; 10: Reflections on Medicare´s Politics: Puzzles and Patterns; Medicare Scholarship: A Selective Review Essay
Klappentext
The new edition of a 1973 work analyzing the political forces, interactions, and ideas that created welfare. Leaving the original work basically unchanged, the author has also added a second section that explores the political evolution of Medicare since its inception into the 1990s.
