The ongoing debate over Medicare: understanding the philosophical and policy divides

This Article examines the evolution and status of Medicare, as well as the myriad current efforts to reform this longstanding entitlement. The author analyzes why healthcare financing for the elderly follows an administered pricing, fee-for-service model, while the working population generally obtains its insurance under a competitive market model. As a non-means-tested program modeled after Social Security, Medicare embraces both a universal entitlement philosophy of government-provided basic health services, and a need-based entitlement philosophy of caring for the Medicare-eligible elderly.     

Economic Elites and Support for Housing Affordability Policy: How a Housing-Health Belief Matters

Political Behavior - To investigate economic elites’ housing policy preferences and test the attitudinal, contextual, political, and economic conditions that drive support for affordable...     

Damned If You Do,Damned If You Don't: Performative Power and the Strategy of Conventional and Nuclear Defusing

This article seeks to initiate a new round of strategic intellectual innovation in an era when threats posed by non-state terrorist organizations and their state supporters do not resemble Cold War threats. Based on an interpretative sociological reading of the concepts of power, security, and rationality, it argues that a “damned if you do, damned if you don't” dilemma is to the post-Cold War era what the danger of surprise attack or unintended nuclear war was to the Cold War: the defining structural threat of international politics. The dilemma leaves states confronting asymmetrical warfare with the choice of reacting with force to a terrorist act or practicing appeasement. Neither approach, however, can achieve the goal of putting an end to terrorism. Deterrence sustains the dilemma by providing a rationale for why force should be used and why self-restraint is irrational. This article proposes a third option, defusing, which may be accomplished by denial (preventing provocateurs from dragging states into the use of force) and restructuration (transforming the structure and rules of the situation). Defusing relies on “performative power”—the capacity to project a dramatic and credible performance on the world stage and to decouple social actors, their audiences, and their most deeply held strategic beliefs. The force of the argument is illustrated by examples from the global “war on terror,” the 2006 Lebanon War, the 2008–09 operation “Cast Lead” in Gaza, and the Iranian nuclear crisis.