Social Insurance: America's Neglected Heritage and Contested Future

What has America done to protect its citizens from life-changing but common risks such as death of a family breadwinner, ill health, disability, involuntary unemployment, outliving retirement savings, and birth into a poor family? Each, in its own way, burdens―and possibly devastates―unlucky individuals and families both emotionally and financially. It is the rare life that is untouched by one or more of these six threats. How do our current policies affect taxation, spending, and the economy, as well as prospects for individual lives? What more might these policies do to protect Americans?

Rich in stories, data, and analysis, Social Insurance provides a strong intellectual foundation for understanding the history, economics, politics, and philosophy of America’s most important social insurance programs. This insightful work provides a unifying vision of these programs’ purposes and reminds us, amidst the confusing and often apocalyptic rhetoric, why we have the programs and policies we do, while arguing for reforms that preserve and enhance the protections in place.

Theodore (Ted) Marmor is professor emeritus of public policy and management and professor emeritus of political science at Yale University. Marmor is an accomplished author and co-author of eleven books, and has published over a hundred articles in a wide range of scholarly journals. Additionally, he is a frequent Op-Ed contributor to U.S. and Canadian newspapers. Marmor began his career as a special assistant to Wilbur Cohen (Secretary of HEW) in the mid-1960s. He has served as associate dean of Minnesota′s School of Public Affairs, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the head of Yale′s Center for Health Services, a member of President Carter′s Commission on the National Agenda for the 1980s, and a senior social policy advisor to Walter Mondale in the presidential campaign of 1984. He has testified before Congress about medical care reform, social security, and welfare issues, as well as being a consultant to government and non-profit agencies.

Jerry L. Mashaw, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, teaches courses on administrative law, social welfare policy, regulation, legislation, and the design of public institutions. His books include Administrative Law: Introduction to the American Public Law System, Sixth Edition (with Richard Merrill and Peter Shane, 2009); Bureaucratic Justice (1983), awarded Harvard University’s Gerard Henderson Memorial Prize in 1993; The Struggle for Auto Safety (with David Harfst, 1990), awarded the Sixth Annual Scholarship Prize of the ABA’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy in 1992; and Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law (1997), awarded the ABA’s Section’s Twelfth Annual Scholarship Prize in 1998 and the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 2002. He is a frequent contributor to legal and public policy journals, newspapers, and news magazines. Professor Mashaw is a founding member and past President of the National Academy of Social Insurance.

John Pakutka is managing director of The Crescent Group, an advisory services firm with expertise in healthcare management, policy, and litigation. Firm clients have included Fortune 500 companies, Global 100 law firms, health systems, investment banks, state governments, and the United States Department of Justice. Prior to founding The Crescent Group, he worked for Exxon/Reliance Electric, the United States Government Accountability Office, Yale University, and APM/Computer Sciences Corporation. He has served on numerous public and non-profit boards and commissions, most recently the Connecticut State Legislature’s Task Force on Small Business Health Costs and the Citizenship Fund of the Connecticut Secretary of the State. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from Cornell and a MA in public and private management from Yale, where he lectures annually in the Product Planning class at the School of Management.