| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Health Security for All: Dreams of Universal Health Care in America. By Alan Derickson. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiv, 240 pp. $30.00, ISBN 0-8018-8081-5.)
In comparison with other industrial democracies, Americans are less insured for the costs of health care, and the care we receive is costlier. Yet, serious reform of American medicine has been enormously difficult to achieve and comprehensive reform impossible.	1
Alan Derickson's book seeks to reframe our understanding of health's place in twentieth-century American politics. He sets the improvement of American health status itself—rather than the financing of sickness care—at the center of his inquiry. To start, it makes sense to understand what scholarship Derickson is rejecting.	2
The conventional account is this: on multiple occasions before World War I and after World War II, comprehensive national reform was seriously considered (and in 1973–1974, appeared imminent). In all these instances, reform coalitions fell short of the necessary political majorities. Each failure has its own peculiar history, but one fact remains—while Americans have persistently criticized the nation's medical arrangements, our politics have made us unable to find a solution that satisfies enough of the public to overwhelm the other institutional and interest-group barriers to reform. The familiar explanation is institutional and ideological. To this understanding Derickson supplies answers to a differently framed puzzle, or at least he works to do so.	. . .

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