Maintaining the Status Quo: The Impact of Old-Age Interest Groups on the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988

Pensioner political movements emerged in the interwar years in America and Europe. Documentary and empirical analyses confirm the influential role such movements played in helping shape the postwar social security systems of Western societies. Pensioner movements, qua pensioner movements, have failed to retain their influence, despite that "old age" and its demographic significance have become more salient. We propose three explanations for this: the first concerns the failure of old age to connect with the generational ethos of identity politics; the second reflects the nature of the actors now involved in the governance of old age; and the third concerns the individualization of retirement as a phase of life.

show abstract

Is the Affordable Care Act Cultivating a Cross-Class Constituency? Income, Partisanship, and a Proposal for Tracing the Contingent Nature of Positive Policy Feedback Effects

Chattopadhyay

2018

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social Security and Medicare enjoy strong political coalitions within the mass public because middle-class Americans believe they derive benefits from these programs and stand alongside lower-income beneficiaries in defending them from erosion. By pooling data from nine nationally representative surveys, this article examines whether the Affordable Care Act (ACA) is cultivating a similar cross-class constituency. The results show that middle-income Americans are less likely than low-income Americans to say the ACA has helped them personally so far. On the other hand, partisanship conditions the relationship between income and beliefs about benefits likely to be derived from the ACA in the long run. In total, the results suggest that cross-class Democratic optimism about long-run benefits may enable the ACA to reap positive beneficiary feedbacks, but a large and bipartisan cross-class constituency appears unlikely. Drawing on these results, this article also makes theoretical contributions to the policy feedback literature by underscoring the need for research on prospections' power in policy feedbacks and proposing a strategy for researchers, policy makers, and public managers to identify where partisanship intervenes in the standard policy feedback logic model, and thereby to better assess how it fragments and conditions positive feedback effects in target populations.

show abstract

Maintaining the Status Quo: The Impact of Old-Age Interest Groups on the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988

Cited by 7 publications

References 10 publications

Sociological Approaches to Understanding Age and Aging

Sociological Approaches to Understanding Age and Aging

The Power of Silver: Age and Identity Politics in the 21st Century

Is the Affordable Care Act Cultivating a Cross-Class Constituency? Income, Partisanship, and a Proposal for Tracing the Contingent Nature of Positive Policy Feedback Effects

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About