Entitlement Politics: Medicare and Medicaid, 1995-2001

This book has two principal purposes. One is to acquaint the reader with the intimate procedural give-and-take of policy making for the Medicare and Medicaid programs, and how this process relates to larger political, governmental, and constitutional issues. The other is to provide sufficient detail and explanation to enable the reader to navigate with greater skill and confidence in this policy domain. As the two major health care entitlement programs, Medicare and Medicaid are accorded an usual degree of respect; they are vitally important for their beneficiaries, but also entrenched and hard to change. Over the past six years, from 1995 to 2001, they have been caught up in a nearly revolutionary attempt to shrink the Federal government and privatize or decentralize public activities. Entitlement Politics describes how Federal government institutions were politically mobilized for these efforts and, by the opposition, in defense of these programs. The protracted six-year struggle ended in a stalemate, with indications that partisan conflict over these entitlements is likely to resume.