40. Season III, Episode II: Healthcare

A full transcript of this episode is available here.

This week, we are exploring the history of healthcare policy. Many presidents have tried to pass healthcare reform in America, but time and time again healthcare has tested the limitations and the strengths of the bully pulpit. 

In today’s episode, we explored the history of the federal government’s interest in healthcare from the New Deal to Obamacare. We consider, why has healthcare reform been so tricky to implement? What role does the president play in passing healthcare reform? And, how has the pandemic shaped our ideas about healthcare, public health, and the presidency?

We spoke with two special guests. Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun is an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health. His new book, All Health Politics is Local: Battles for Community Health in the Mid-Century United States is available for preorder from UNC Press. Dr. Guian McKee is an Associate Professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center, where he works on the Presidential Recordings Project. He is also currently working on a book project that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II. 

Guests:

Dr. Merlin Chowkwanyun is an assistant professor at the Columbia University School of Public Health.

Dr. Merlin Chowkwanyun's work centers on the history of community health, environmental health regulation, racial inequality, and activism around health. He his new book, All Health Politics is Local: Battles for Community Health in the Mid-Century United States, is available for preorder with UNC Press. In All Health Politics Is Local, Merlin Chowkwanyun takes us to four very different places—New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Central Appalachia—to show how health activists battled over control of medical infrastructure and communities fought to stave off new environmental health risks.

He is working on another book on political unrest at medical schools and neighborhood health activism during the 1960s and 1970s. Chowkwanyun is also the PI (co-PI David Rosner) on a recent National Science Foundation Standard Research Grant for ToxicDocs.org, a depository of millions of pages of once-secret documents on industrial poisons.

Dr. Chowkwanyun teaches courses on health advocacy and mixed methods, and in the CORE, co-teaches the social determinants module. He is most proud of the two teaching awards he has won at Mailman for Excellence in Teaching and Innovation in Teaching.

Follow Merlin Chowkwanyun on Twitter @merlinc2.

Dr. Guian McKee is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center.

Guian McKee is an associate professor in Presidential Studies at the Miller Center. He received a PhD in American history at the University of California, Berkeley in May 2002, and he is the author of The Problem of Jobs: Liberalism, Race, and Deindustrialization in Philadelphia, published in November 2008 by the University of Chicago Press. At the Miller Center, McKee works extensively with the Presidential Recordings Program.

He is currently working on a book project that examines the rise of the health care economy in American cities after World War II, focusing on the development of hospitals and academic medical centers as critical but problematic urban economic anchors as well as drivers of cost in the larger health care system. This project builds on his earlier work by connecting social, political, and economic developments in specific places (Baltimore provides a core case study for the book) with larger policy choices, especially those made by presidents (drawing in particular on the Center’s presidential oral histories). His work offers an alternative narrative of health care policy history – and of health care reform – by focusing on the consequences of health care spending.

McKee has written about health care in a variety of venues, including an essay on the connections between health care employment and the upheavals in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray, as well as an op-ed on how both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton’s health care policy proposals in the 2016 Democratic primary ignored key parts of the health care cost problem. McKee’s work on health care also led to an essay on Lyndon Johnson and the passage of Medicare and Medicaid for the Miller Center’s First Year Project, for which he served as a co-editor of Volume 3 on Fiscal Policy and Volume 6 on Opportunity and Mobility.

 Follow Guian McKee on Twitter @guian_mckee.