Jacob Hacker

Democrats gather in Denver this week with worries as well as hopes. It's not just that Barack Obama is locked in a dead heat with John McCain. It's also that he is barely winning - and in some polls actually losing - on the issue that should be his strongest - the economy.

If Obama is going to triumph, he needs to attract the middle-class voters who've watched their jobs, health care, retirement savings and family finances grow less secure. But this will only happen if he… more

"Over the past 30 years, American politics has become more money-centred at exactly the same time that American society has grown more unequal," the political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have written. The resources and organisational heft of the well-off and hyper-conservative have exploded. But the organisational resources of middle-income Americans . . . have atrophied. The resulting inequality has greatly benefited the Republican Party while drawing it closer to its most affluent and extreme supporters..." LINK

One of the big issues, if not the biggest issue, in this year’s presidential campaign is described in “The Great Risk Shift,” a book by Yale political science professor Jacob S. Hacker.

Hacker’s theme can be summarized in a single sentence: “Over the last generation … we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families.”

As evidence, Hacker cites with clear opprobrium the… more

"Medicare naturally makes for strange bedfellows," Jacob Hacker, a political science professor a the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream wrote in an email. "Both conservatives and liberals have an interest in keeping the program's costs in line. The divisions are much deeper when it comes to expanding the role of government in health care -- and the political fight will be that much fiercer..."

..."Democrats should take away from the Medicare… more

...Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at the University of California Berkeley and author of “The Great Risk Shift,” said Democratic leaders have been frustrated by several factors since taking the majority of the House and Senate after the 2006 elections: comparatively thin majorities, especially in the Senate; their insistence on adhering to pay-as-you-go budget rules that often require tax increases to support any substantial new spending; and the fact that relief bills such as the housing measure are limited in scope and largely throw money at a problem,… more

"People value the idea of a period beyond their work life," said Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has studied U.S. pension and health care policies. "Retirement was the victory of the affluent society over the need to be a cog in the machine your whole working life..." LINK

Polls show that health care ranks near the top of voters’ concerns, especially among Democrats. And for those who say “the economy” is the top issue, health care is usually a major part of their financial worries.

And yet, voters must be awfully confused about where the Democrats stand on health care. On the one hand, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say they want to insure everyone -- and in much the same way. On the other hand, more

"Socialized medicine" is the bogeyman that just won't die. The epithet has been hurled at every national health plan since the New Deal -- even Medicare, which critics warned would strip Americans of their freedom.

And now it's back. Republicans from President Bush on down have invoked the specter of socialism in denouncing Democrats' attempts to expand publicly funded health insurance for children. Erstwhile GOP presidential contenders Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney lambasted the health plans of the leading Democratic candidates… more

With the March 4 primaries delivering finality on one side of the partisan divide and uncertainty on the other, it’s a good time to take stock of where the candidates are on health care. For now, most attention has centered on the scrap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over an “individual mandate” requiring everyone to have health insurance. But this fight will look like a college seminar discussion compared with the take-no-prisoners battle that’s likely to emerge between John… more

Arguments Mount for a National Healthcare System (Christian Science Monitor)

...In the current campaign season, Senator McCain calls for dozens of reforms to bring down costs and make expenditures more effective in health results. And he states, "we can and must provide access to healthcare for all our citizens." His proposals, though, don't fully embrace the uninsured.

Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the centrist New America Foundation, charges that McCain is "so wedded to the free market that he… more