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The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States by Marie GORRSCHALK, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000, 320 pp., ISBN 0-8014-3745-8 (cloth) and 0-8014-8648-3 (paper).
Alone among industrialized nations, the United States lacks a program guaranteeing universal access to health care. In this context, Marie Gottschalk's The Shadow Welfare State: Labor, Business, and the Politics of Health Care in the United States, is an intelligent and encyclopedic account of labour's efforts on behalf of health care reform in the U.S. This very well written and engaging book touches myriad issues in the history of labour, social democracy, and American political institutions.
The introduction stresses gaps in scholarship on labour, health policy, and the welfare state. Chapter 2 documents the poorly understood role of organized labour in the development of the "private welfare state" in the United States. Chapter 3 follows with a chronicle of labour's experience with job-based health benefits. In chapter 4, Gottschalk argues that American labour began to abandon its commitment to national health insurance in a capitulation to the politics of expediency in the years of the Carter presidency. Chapter 5 links labour's changing strategy on health care reform to misguided efforts to forge coalitions with big business. Chapters 6 and 7 set out Gottschalk's critique of labour's broad approach to political economy. The final chapter addresses the future of labour activism and health care reform.
Gottschalk...