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. 2008 Sep;98(9 Suppl):S69-79.
doi: 10.2105/ajph.98.supplement_1.s69.

Health care reform and social movements in the United States

Beatrix Hoffman  1
Affiliations

Health care reform and social movements in the United States

Beatrix Hoffman. Am J Public Health. 2008 Sep.

Abstract

Because of the importance of grassroots social movements, or "change from below," in the history of US reform, the relationship between social movements and demands for universal health care is a critical one. National health reform campaigns in the 20th century were initiated and run by elites more concerned with defending against attacks from interest groups than with popular mobilization, and grassroots reformers in the labor, civil rights, feminist, and AIDS activist movements have concentrated more on immediate and incremental changes than on transforming the health care system itself. However, grassroots health care demands have also contained the seeds of a wider critique of the American health care system, leading some movements to adopt calls for universal coverage.

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“Toward Better National Health” is a pamphlet from the Technical Committee on Medical Care of the Interdepartmental Committee to Coordinate Health and Welfare Activities, published by the Government Printing Office in 1939. From the US Health Activism History Collection of the Institute of Social Medicine and Community Health.
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Members of Disabled in Action lead a march through downtown Philadelphia sponsored by Health Care for All/Philadelphia, on April 22, 1992, demanding that the candidates for US president endorse a universal and comprehensive single-payer health insurance plan. Photograph by Julie Davids. Courtesy of the Institute of Social Medicine and Community Health.
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ACT UP Records, 1993, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library.
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AIDS activists join in the April, 1992, Health Care for All/Philadelphia march. Photograph by Julie Davids. Courtesy of the Institute of Social Medicine and Community Health.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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References

    1. On social movements and grass-roots activism, see Tarrow Sidney, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action and Politics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Marco Guigni, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly, eds, How Social Movements Matter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Temma Kaplan, Crazy for Democracy: Women in Grass-roots Movements (New York: Routledge, 1997).
    1. From 1943 to 1965, opinion polls showed that “a relatively stable two-thirds majority of Americans” favored “some government role in the financing of personal health services”; Marmor Theodore, The Politics of Medicare (London: Routledge, 1970), 3. See also Lawrence Jacobs, The Health of Nations: Public Opinion and the Making of British and American Health Policy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Reuters, “Poll finds momentum for radical health care reform,” August 26, 2002, available at: http://www.ada.org/prof/pubs/daily/0208/0826us.html. Accessed October 22, 2002.
    1. Numbers Ronald, Almost Persuaded: American Physicians and Compulsory Health Insurance, 1912–1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Beatrix Hoffman, The Wages of Sickness: The Politics of Health Insurance in Progressive America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), chap 4.
    1. Hoffman, Wages of Sickness, chap 7 and 8.
    1. Gordon Colin, Dead on Arrival: Health Care and the Limits of Social Provision in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, in press), 410; Jonathan Engel, Doctors and Reformers: Discussion and Debate Over Health Policy, 1925–1950 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), chap 2.

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