Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle over Health Care Reform, Revised Edition

A leading expert explains how Americans trapped themselves in a costly and complicated health system—and came to fight so bitterly about changing it

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 the Affordable Care Act 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 health-care 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 health-care 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.

• Governing Health: The Politics of Health Policy
• Priced Out: The Economic and Ethical Costs of American Health Care
• Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882
• The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care
• America's Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System
• The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry
• Management Principles for Health Professionals
• Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America
• The Politics of Medicare: Second Edition (Social Institutions and Social Change Series)
• In Sickness and in Wealth: American Hospitals in the Twentieth Century