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4.5
"Social Insurance: America's Neglected Heritage and Contested Future" is an extraordinary book. As one of the blurbs on the back cover claims, quite correctly, “This may be the best one-volume introduction to the American welfare state ever written.” The authors, Theodore Marmor, Jerry Mashaw, and John Pakutka are experienced and extremely capable social scientists and public policy and health systems analysts who have published numerous important works on American and international social insurance programs.Social insurance programs, including Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, Medicare, and Medicaid, are intended to protect individuals and families against financial threats such as being born into a poor family, the early death of a family breadwinner, involuntary unemployment, disability or outliving one’s savings in old age, and unaffordably high medical expenditures. All of us face such risks in developed economies, risks that can easily outrun the capacities of individual planning or commercial insurance to provide adequate protections.Social insurance programs, as the authors note, “typically condition benefits on some level of prior contributions toward the support of the programs. The more universal both contributions and benefits are, the closer the program is to the social insurance model.” (p. 37) Usually social insurance offers earned benefits “for which all similarly situated persons are eligible because of their financial contribution,” whether in the form of payroll or income taxes.”All too often we forget the nature of these programs and their vast importance to individuals, families, and the wider economy. This volume seeks to help us understand what they do, how they do it, and why they are so valuable. It is written for the general reader as well as the experienced analyst. Numerous detailed examples of individual risks addressed by social insurance programs and well-written analyses of each program make this book a delight to read in a field studded with difficult and (for most of us who are not experts) virtually unreadable works.I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is particularly important in the context of current political discussions, in which powerful, but ignorant attacks on social insurance programs are launched continually and most of us, although we support individual programs strongly, have forgotten or never knew why they exist, why they have had bipartisan support over many decades, and why we should continue to defend them.
