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Social Welfare History in the Age of Diversity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

EDWARD D. BERKOWITZ*
Affiliation:
George Washington University, USA

Abstract

This policy perspective discusses three important social welfare programs—Social Security Disability Insurance, Medicare, and Temporary Aid to Needy Families—and offers an explanation of how they have expanded over time.

Type
Critical Perspective
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

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References

Notes

1. I have developed the arguments in this essay further in Berkowitz, Edward D., Making Social Welfare Policy in America: Three Case Studies since 1950 (Chicago, 2020)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Katznelson, Ira, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York, 2013).Google Scholar

3. Mary Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Chapel Hill, 2006).

4. Deborah Stone, The Disabled State (Philadelphia, 1984); Robert Haveman, Victor Halberstadt, and Richard Burkhauser, Public Policy Toward Disabled Workers: Cross-National Analyses of Economic Impacts (Ithaca, 1984); Jennifer L. Erkulwater, Disability Rights and the American Social Safety Net (Ithaca, 2006); Erkulwater, “Constructive Welfare: The Social Security Act, the Blind, and the Origins of Political Identity among People with Disabilities, 1935–1950,” Studies in American Political Development 33 (April 2019): 110–38; Erkulwater, “How the Nation’s Largest Minority Became White: Race Politics and the Disability Rights Movement,” Policy History 30 (2018): 367–69; Kornbluh, Felicia, “Disability, Antiprofessionalism, and Civil Rights: The National Federation of the Blind and the ‘Right to Organize’ in the 1950s,” Journal of American History 97 (2011): 1023–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Richard Scotch, From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 2001).

5. “The law of 1956 bore many marks from its long and intensely political passage.” Martha Derthick, Policymaking for Social Security (Washington, DC, 1979), 308.

6. DeWitt, Larry and Berkowitz, Edward D., “Health Care,” in A Companion to Lyndon B. Johnson, ed. Lerner, Mitchell R. (Malden, MA, 2012), 163–86Google Scholar; Eugene Feingold, Medicare: Policy and Politics: A Case Study and Policy Analysis (San Francisco, 1966); Richard Harris, A Sacred Trust (New York, 1966); Theodore Marmor, The Politics of Medicare (Hawthorne, NY, 1973); Herman Somers and Ann Somers, Medicare and the Hospitals: Issues and Prospects (Washington, DC, 1967); Sheri David, With Dignity: The Search for Medicare and Medicaid (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983); Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s (New York, 1984), 228; Jonathan Oberlander, The Political Life of Medicare (Chicago, 2003).

7. Chapin, Christy Ford, Ensuring America’s Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System (New York, 2015), 1, 3, 78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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