David Blumenthal & James A. Morone — Whiplash
Two leading health policy scholars trace America's chaotic, cyclical healthcare system across administrations and explain why it never stabilizes.
Why we picked this
Blumenthal and Morone are two of the most serious scholars of American healthcare. This is a structural explanation for why health policy swings so violently — useful for understanding a system most people find baffling.
David Blumenthal and James A. Morone’s “Whiplash” examines why American healthcare policy lurches from expansion to retrenchment and back — why every administration inherits a system shaped by its predecessors’ compromises and then creates new contradictions for whoever follows. The book traces this pattern across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, finding structural explanations rather than blaming individual politicians.
Blumenthal is a physician and president emeritus of the Commonwealth Fund, one of the most respected health policy research organizations in the country. Morone is a professor of political science at Brown University and the author of “The Heart of Power,” a history of presidents and health reform. Together they bring both policy depth and political history to the analysis.
The conversation will address the current state of American healthcare, the historical forces that produced it, and what — if anything — breaks the cycle. Open to audience questions.