Synopsis
Social insurance in the United States-including the Social Security Act of 1935 and the Medicare Medicaid and disability insurance programs that were added later-may be the greatest triumph of American domestic policy. But true security has not been achieved. As Michael J. Graetz and Jerry L. Mashaw show in this pathbreaking book the nation's system of social insurance is riddled with gaps inefficiencies and inequities. Even the most popular and successful programs Medicare and Social Security face serious financial challenges from the coming retirement of the baby boom generation and the aging of the population. This book challenges the notion that American social insurance must remain inadequate unaffordable or both. In sharp contrast to policymakers and analysts who debate only one income security program at a time Graetz and Mashaw examine social insurance whole to assess its crucial role in providing economic security in a dynamic market economy. They recognize that notwithstanding a proper emphasis on individual freedom and responsibility Americans share a common fate that binds them together in a common enterprise. The authors offer us a new vision of the social insurance contract and concrete proposals to make the nation's families more secure without increasing costs.
Review
Americans value freedom, say authors Michael J. Graetz and Jerry L. Mashaw, but they also want security--the sense that someone or something will take care of them if times turn tough. And although the United States has established an elaborate system of social welfare, much could be improved. "For reasons of history, politics, inertia, and simple error, we have constructed a social insurance regime that is riddled with gaps, overlaps, inefficiencies, and inequities," write the two Yale Law School professors in True Security. Social insurance--meaning the network of Social Security, child welfare, health insurance, unemployment insurance, disability benefits, and so on--has become "simultaneously inadequate and unaffordable." What's more, they write, much of it "is badly designed." Graetz and Mashaw approach the problem not as dismantlers but reformers ("We come to praise social insurance, not disparage it," they say in a prologue). They examine the state of social insurance today in technocratic detail and then propose a series of solutions to the problems they identify. They would, for instance, offer vouchers for housing and health insurance, plus link disability insurance and workers' compensation. They would modernize Social Security, keeping it a defined-benefits system but also mandating individual retirement savings accounts and broad participation in capital markets. The result is a neoliberal tract that will appeal to New Democrats and other advocates of the heralded "third way" between the failures of socialism and the excesses of capitalism. --John J. Miller
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
