The Road to Nowhere

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Work
Review: What Noam Chomsky is to politics, Jacob Hacker is to American Health Reform in the 1990s. In a concise and readable fashion, Hacker explains why universal health reforms started to spring up - almost form nowhere - to achieve major attention in the early 90s, only to recede into the periphery of political issues today.

Surprise, surprise, it has little to do with principles and everything to do with being a potential winning election issue. Hacker details in depth how Jim Carville and co. used the health issue to give Democratic Senate hopeful Harris Wofford a come-from-behind win, only to gravitate to then Governor Clinton's Presidential bid the following year with a similar strategy. The critical role of the New York Times editorial board in "agenda setting" the issue of "managed competition" (while simultaneously squelching more liberal options like a single payer system), is outlined in detail. What's most striking is Clinton's almost naive belief that, if he proffered a sufficiently "centrist" bill, Republicans would have to negotiate with him. The book clearly details the various actors and how they affected not only Clinton's thinking, but the range of "practical" health reform options.

If you read one book on US health policy, make it this one.