Journal article
Why No National Health Insurance in the U.S.? The Limits of Social Provision in War and Peace, 1941–1948
Journal of policy history, Vol.9(3), pp.277-310
07/1997
DOI: 10.1017/S0898030600006035
Abstract
Why, alone among its democratic capitalist peers, does the U.S. not have national health insurance? This question has invited a range of replies; some focusing on specific historical episodes, some invoking grand political or cultural or economic explanations for the peculiar trajectory American social policy. For the most part, the historical accounts have trouble climbing from narrative to explanation; little of the scholarship on the failure of health reform in 1920 or 1935 or 1948 or 1970 or 1994 makes any substantial contribution to our larger understanding of the American welfare state and its limits. And the theoretical accounts often stumble on the descent to historical context; the largely artificial debate between “state-centered” and economic explanations, for example, rests largely on abstractions which are either not unique to the American setting (capitalism, industrialism, liberalism) or which are offered in such broad strokes that they make little sense in specific historical contexts. In explaining this “hole” in the American welfare state, it is necessary to pursue two lines of inquiry; to consider both the relative success of other American social programs during the years in which health insurance was beating at the door, and the relative success of public health insurance in other national settings. Our understanding of the American health debate of the 1940s, in other words, must in part explain both the distinct trajectory of health policy during the formative years of Social Security, and the “exceptional” character of the American welfare state.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Why No National Health Insurance in the U.S.? The Limits of Social Provision in War and Peace, 1941–1948
- Creators
- Colin Gordon - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of policy history, Vol.9(3), pp.277-310
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- DOI
- 10.1017/S0898030600006035
- ISSN
- 0898-0306
- eISSN
- 1528-4190
- Number of pages
- 34
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 07/1997
- Academic Unit
- History; Public Policy Center (Archive)
- Record Identifier
- 9984251619302771
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