Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

Although the United States spends 16 percent of its gross domestic product on health care, more than 46 million people have no insurance coverage, while one in four Americans report difficulty paying for medical care. Indeed, the U.S. health care system, despite being the most expensive health care system in the world, ranked thirty-seventh in a comprehensive World Health Organization report. With health care spending only expected to increase, Americans are again debating new ideas for expanding coverage and cutting costs. According to the historian Paul V. Dutton, Americans should look to France, whose health care system captured the World Health Organization's number-one spot. InDifferential Diagnoses, Dutton debunks a common misconception among Americans that European health care systems are essentially similar to each other and vastly different from U.S. health care. In fact, the Americans and the French both distrust \"socialized medicine.\" Both peoples cherish patient choice, independent physicians, medical practice freedoms, and private insurers in a qualitatively different way than the Canadians, the British, and many others. The United States and France have struggled with the same ideals of liberty and equality, but one country followed a path that led to universal health insurance; the other embraced private insurers and has only guaranteed coverage for the elderly and the very poor. How has France reconciled the competing ideals of individual liberty and social equality to assure universal coverage while protecting patient and practitioner freedoms? What can Americans learn from the French experience, and what can the French learn from the U.S. example?Differential Diagnosesanswers these questions by comparing how employers, labor unions, insurers, political groups, the state, and medical professionals have shaped their nations' health care systems from the early years of the twentieth century to the present day.

World War II forced extensive and comprehensive social and political changes on nations across the globe. This comparative examination of health insurance in the United States and Japan during and after the war explores how World War II shaped the health care systems of both countries. To compare the development of health insurance in the two countries, Takakazu Yamagishi discusses the impact of total war on four factors: political structure, interest group politics, political culture, and policy feedback. During World War II, the U.S. and Japanese governments realized that healthy soldiers, workers, mothers, and children were vital to national survival. While both countries adopted new, expansive national insurance policies as part of their mobilization efforts, they approached doing so in different ways and achieved near-opposite results. In the United States, private insurance became the predominant means of insuring people, save for a few government-run programs. Japan, meanwhile, created a near-universal, public insurance system. After the war, their different policy paths were consolidated. Yamagishi argues that these disparate outcomes were the result of each nation's respective war experience. He looks closely at postwar Japan and investigates how political struggles between the American occupation authority and U.S. domestic forces, such as the American Medical Association, helped solidify the existing Japanese health insurance system. Original and tightly argued, this volume makes a strong case for treating total war as a central factor in understanding how the health insurance systems of the two nations grew, while bearing in mind the dual nature of government intervention—however slight—in health care. Those interested in debates about health care in Japan, the United States, and other countries, and especially scholars of comparative political development, will appreciate and learn from Yamagishi's study.

Reveals the roots of America's failure to address the health care need of its citizens. In a comprehensive history of the failed efforts to enact universal insurance from the 1940s to the 1990s, the author shows how each attempt to enact national health insurance has met with fierce attacks by stakeholders

Can American health insurance survive? In The Transformation of American Health Insurance, Troyen A. Brennan traces the historical evolution of public and private health insurance in the United States from the first Blue Cross plans in the late 1930s to reforms under the Biden administration. In analyzing this evolution, he finds long-term trends that form the basis for his central argument: that employer-sponsored insurance is becoming unsustainably expensive, and Medicare for All will emerge as the sole source of health insurance over the next two decades. After thirty years of leadership in health care and academia, Brennan argues that Medicare for All could act as a single-payer program or become a government-regulated program of competing health plans, like today's Medicare Advantage. The choice between these two options will depend on how private insurers adapt and behave in today's changing health policy environment. This critical evolution in the system of financing health care is important to employers, health insurance executives, government officials, and health care providers who are grappling with difficult strategic choices. It is equally important to all Americans as they face an inscrutable health insurance system and wonder what the future might hold for them regarding affordable coverage.

Current interest in a single-payer approach to universal health care coverage in the United States has also triggered interest in alternative multipayer approaches to the same goal. An analysis of experiences in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Israel shows how the founding of each system required a distinctive political settlement and how the subsequent timing, content, and course of the reforms were shaped by political circumstances and adjustments to the founding bargain in each nation. Although none of these systems is directly transferable to the United States, certain parallels with the American context suggest that a multipayer approach might offer a model for universal coverage that is more politically feasible than a single-payer scheme but also that issues associated with risk selection and other potential inequities would remain.

Consumers need information to compare alternatives for markets to function efficiently. Recognizing this, public policies often pair competition with easy access to comparative information. The implicit assumption is that comparison friction—the wedge between the availability of comparative information and consumers' use of it—is inconsequential because when information is readily available, consumers will access this information and make effective choices. We examine the extent of comparison friction in the market for Medicare Part D prescription drug plans in the United States. In a randomized field experiment, an intervention group received a letter with personalized cost information. That information was readily available for free and widely advertised. However, this additional step—providing the information rather than having consumers actively access it—had an impact. Plan switching was 28% in the intervention group, versus 17% in the comparison group, and the intervention caused an average decline in predicted consumer cost of about $100 a year among letter recipients—roughly 5% of the cost in the comparison group. Our results suggest that comparison friction can be large even when the cost of acquiring information is small and may be relevant for a wide range of public policies that incorporate consumer choice.

200th Anniversary Article: Unfinished Journey — A Century of Health Care Reform in the U.S. In 1915, reformers issued the first major proposal for national health insurance in the United States. Nearly a century later, Americans are still debating health care reform, the perils of “socialized medicine,” and the tension between individual liberty and government aid. In 1915, reformers issued the first major proposal for national health insurance in the United States (see timeline). They believed that America should follow European countries such as Germany and England in securing access to medical care for workers and protecting them against the economic burdens of illness. The leadership of the American Medical Association (AMA) initially agreed, and the prospects for reform appeared promising. Yet by 1920, the health care reform campaign had failed, the victim of intense opposition (from businesses and the insurance industry, among others), bad timing (the American entry into World War I), demagoguery, and xenophobia . . .

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his platform, reopening an old debate. What are the virtues and vices of single-payer reform? Is it a realistic option for the United States or a political impossibility? The 2016 U.S. presidential campaign has produced many surprises. One unexpected turn is the reemergence of single-payer health insurance on the public agenda. Senator Bernie Sanders has made Medicare for All a centerpiece of his platform. His opponent for the Democratic party’s presidential nomination, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, has criticized Sanders’s plan as unrealistic. An old debate has thus reopened. What are the virtues and vices of single-payer reform? Is it a realistic option for the United States or a political impossibility? First, a note on language. “Single payer” is often used loosely to refer to everything from . . .

Why, alone among industrial democracies, does the United States not have national health insurance? While many books have addressed this question, Dead on Arrival is the first to do so based on original archival research for the full sweep of the twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of political, reform, business, and labor records, Colin Gordon traces a complex and interwoven story of political failure and private response. He examines, in turn, the emergence of private, work-based benefits; the uniquely American pursuit of social insurance; the influence of race and gender on the health care debate; and the ongoing confrontation between reformers and powerful economic and health interests.Dead on Arrival stands alone in accounting for the failure of national or universal health policy from the early twentieth century to the present. As importantly, it also suggests how various interests (doctors, hospitals, patients, workers, employers, labor unions, medical reformers, and political parties) confronted the question of health care - as a private responsibility, as a job-based benefit, as a political obligation, and as a fundamental right.Using health care as a window onto the logic of American politics and American social provision, Gordon both deepens and informs the contemporary debate. Fluidly written and deftly argued, Dead on Arrival is thus not only a compelling history of the health care quandary but a fascinating exploration of the country's political economy and political culture through the American century, of the role of private interests and private benefits in the shaping of social policy, and, ultimately, of the ways the American welfare state empowers but also imprisons its citizens.