Summary
Contents
Congress and the Nation is the most authoritative reference on congressional trends, actions, and political and policy controversies. This award-winning series documents the most fiercely debated issues in recent American politics, providing a unique retrospective analysis of the policies the U.S. Congress. Organized by policy area, each chapter contains summaries of legislative activity, including bills passed, defeated, or postponed. No other authoritative source guides readers seamlessly through the policy output of the national legislature with the breadth, depth, and authority of Congress and the Nation.
Congress and the Nation is the most authoritative reference on congressional trends, actions, and political and policy controversies. This award-winning series documents the most fiercely debated issues in recent American politics, providing a unique retrospective analysis of the policies the U.S. Congress. Organized by policy area, each chapter contains summaries of legislative activity, including bills passed, defeated, or postponed. No other authoritative source guides readers seamlessly through the policy output of the national legislature with the breadth, depth, and authority of Congress and the Nation.
Congress and the Nation is the most authoritative reference on congressional trends, actions, and political and policy controversies. This award-winning series documents the most fiercely debated issues in recent American politics, providing a unique retrospective analysis of the policies the U.S. Congress. Organized by policy area, each chapter contains summaries of legislative activity, including bills passed, defeated, or postponed. No other authoritative source guides readers seamlessly through the policy output of the national legislature with the breadth, depth, and authority of Congress and the Nation.
Health and Human Services
Health and Human Services
Introduction
Ronald Reagan came to Washington determined to make the federal government more efficient and less expensive.
Probably nowhere in the federal realm was failure to reach that goal more glaring than in the area of health policy, where over the decade of the 1980s it seemed the government was spending more and more and getting less and less.
While costs spiraled upward faster than in any other sector of the economy, by 1988 an estimated one in six Americans lacked health insurance and the nation boasted an infant mortality rate higher than that of virtually every other developed nation.
Most economists and analysts agreed that the factors contributing to the continued escalation in health-care costs were largely beyond the control of the ...
