Social Insurance and American Health Care: Principles and Paradoxes.

Social insurance, like commercial insurance, is about protection against financial risk. In the United States, Medicare and the Social Security Administration's programs for retirement, disability, worker's compensation, and worker's life insurance have become dominant features of American public policy, amounting to more than 41 percent of the federal budget. Yet their fiscal centrality does not rest on anything like an understanding of what makes social insurance social-or why that is so important to American political life.

The state of American health care: November 2016 to November 2020, a look forward.

The election of Donald Trump, coupled with the retention of Republican majorities in the US House of Representatives and Senate, raises questions about future of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the structure and funding of the country's public health insurance programs - Medicare, Medicaid and the Child Health Insurance Program - and the direction of health policy in the United States, more generally. Political scientists are not renowned for their capacity to predict the future and many of those who forecast election results have received criticism in recent weeks for failing to predict the Trump victory. While the future is uncertain, it is possible for social scientists to offer a 'conditional causal analysis' about the future.

Commercial pressures on professionalism in american medical care: from Medicare to the Affordable Care Act.

Since the passage of Medicare, the self-regulation characteristic of professionalism in health care has come under steady assault. While Canadian physicians chose to relinquish financial autonomy, they have enjoyed far greater professional autonomy over their medical judgments than their U.S.