Remedy and Reaction: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform

By Paul Starr

"In Pulitzer Prizewinning author and presidential advisor Starr's latest effort, he achieves two daunting tasks. First, he objectively draws together the threads of myriad voices and special interests in the century-long American health-care debate and weaves them into a wholly comprehensible pattern. Sadly, it is a pattern of self-destructive behavior of epic proportions wherein the U.S. has repeatedly shot its health-care hopes in the foot and then wondered why it wasn't healing. Indeed, due to a series of radical social and political national mood swings, the entire history reads more like the script for a Punch and Judy puppet show than a focused effort toward a single goal. However, unlike in other industrialized democracies, it appears that such chaos may have to be the fate of a country still trying to invent itself. Second, Starr cogently explains the highlights of the recently passed and highly controversial Affordable Care Act, including important background information that accounts for the law's necessary complexity. In sum, this self-admitted universal-health-care advocate and seasoned realist leaves readers questioning, as he does, whether Americans can summon the elementary decency toward the sick that characterizes other democracies."  (Booklist)  Check Our Catalog