Jahrestagung der European Association for American Studies: The Health of the Nation

Workshop 5: The Changing Intellectual Frameworks of Social Security in Post-Great-Depression America: Health Care Reform as a Case Study

Social security has been a major issue in post-Great Depression American national identity, public life, government action, and economic growth. Moreover throughout the postwar years health care and the need for reform have often been at the center of the social policy controversy in the United States. However intellectual principles and policy preferences in programs of social protection have repeatedly witnessed a pendulum- like movement of change and continuity.

The purpose of this workshop is to analyze how different, progressive as well as conservative intellectual frameworks that have grounded the public conversation on social security and health care since the 1930s, have been a lensis through which different visions of the responsibilities of government, the market, the individual have come to emerge and to engage in intellectual and policy conflicts.

We would like to invite papers that focus on:

- the significant failure to include health insurance in the New Deal and Great Society version of social security
- the discrepancies between Medicare and Medicaid and its effects on the fragmentation of health care
- the conservative backlash on social security since the 1970s and its consequences for health care
- the current controversies on health care reform and its trajectories

Submissions (abstracts with 150-200 words) should be sent to both Marcus Graeser (graeser@ghi-dc.org) and Maurizio Vaudagna (Maurizio.vaudagna@lett.unipmn.it)

Deadline: September 1, 2011

For general information go to http://www.eaas.eu