Jill Quadagno

Florida State University | FSU · Department of Sociology

In the United States, race and racism are woven into the very fabric of the welfare state. Racial antipathy has undermined public support for benefits perceived as favoring African Americans and has resulted in significant cuts in programs for the poor. Recently, some studies have found that public discussion on immigration has linked attitudes tow...

Jill Quadagno and Daniel Lanford review the history and implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA), often called Obamacare. This historical breakthrough in public policy came in the first two years of President Obama’s term. Although the Republican Party opposed the Act and no Republican Congressperson voted for...

Universal healthcare is broadly understood as the availability of basic health services to all people or citizens in a nation. Currently 75 nations have healthcare systems that can be classified as universal. Yet there is considerable variation across nations in how this goal is achieved. The United States stands alone as the only advanced nation l...

Purpose – According to convergence theory, over time societies form similar social structures, political processes and public policies. In 2001, Israel adopted a welfare reform plan that rejected the traditional strategy of passive income support and instead endorsed the concept of activation. The plan was modeled on the Wisconsin Welfare to Work p...

After President Barack Obama signed into law the Affordable Care Act (ACA) of 2010, 26 states filed lawsuits challenging key provisions. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled in support of most provisions but held that the mandatory Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional, in effect making it optional for the states. Yet Medicaid expansion is critical i...

The modern welfare state, which was created in the long economic expansion of the post-World War II era, funded benefits that provided income security across the life course. In the 1970s, the era of welfare state expansion slowed due to rising deficits and fiscal strains associated with population aging. In recent decades benefit reductions have b...

On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Did the ACA signify a government takeover of the health care system, a first step on the road to socialism, as conservative critics charged? Or was it, rather, a sellout to the right wing, as liberal single-payer advocates proclaimed? The...

PurposeThis chapter examines social variations in parent dissatisfaction with children’s medical care and tests whether greater dissatisfaction is associated with less preventive care and unmet medical need. Methodology/approachThe 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) is a nationally representative cross-sectional sample of parents of U...

Quadagno J, Pederson J. Has support for Social Security declined? Attitudes toward the public pension scheme in the USA, 2000 and 2010 Given rising public budgets and population aging, many nations have made significant changes to their public pensions. Between 2000 and 2010, the USA experienced an economic crisis as deep as the Great Depression of...

Every industrial nation in the world guarantees its citizens access to essential health care services-every country, that is, except the United States. In fact, one in eight Americans-43 million people-do not have any health care insurance at all. This book offers a history of America's failed efforts to address the health care needs of its citizen...

Social gerontology is a subfield of gerontology. It is concerned mainly with the social, rather than the biological, aspects of aging. However, social gerontologists do study how biological processes influence the social conditions of aging. Societal aging is one of the most important social trends of this century. It affects the major political, s...

Many studies examine the effect of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA) on employment trends, financial security, and family structure, but few consider its implications for mental health issues. Yet mental health is central to a key objective of welfare reform: increasing work effort and self-suffici...

The modern welfare state was created in the long economic expansion of the post-World War II era, as rising productivity and economic growth made it possible for governments to fund an array of benefits that provided a modicum of income security across the life course. Although welfare states everywhere included benefits for unemployment, health an...

A central sociological premise is that health care systems are organizations that are embedded within larger institutions, which have been shaped by historical precedents and operate within a specific cultural context. Although bound by policy legacies, embedded constituencies, and path dependent processes, health care systems are not rigid, static...

Objective. This study assesses the impact of state policy reforms on health insurance coverage in the U.S. states considering three approaches to reform: consumer protection policies, policies relaxing regulation on insurance companies, and policies expanding public benefits. Methods. Using data collected from several publicly available sources, we...

Despite the burgeoning literature on coalition work, very little is known about the cooperative potential within social movements. Drawing on archival, interview, and secondary data, we examine cooperation and conflict in the US conservative Christian political movement from 1970 to 1994. We highlight how framing, political elites and intramovement...

Most assisted living facility (ALF) residents are White widows in their mid- to late 80s who need assistance with activities of daily living (ADLs) because of frailty or cognitive decline. Yet, ALFs also serve younger individuals with physical disabilities, traumatic brain injury, or serious mental illness. We compare Florida ALFs with different li...

In the political class theories discussed by Manow and van Kersbergen in the first chapter in this volume, the welfare state was depicted as a project of the Left and more specifically of Social Democrats and trade unions. Although proponents of this strong class power thesis acknowledged that Catholicism was a factor in shaping the institutional f...

We examined how organizational characteristics, transition experiences, and social relationships impact three subjective measures of well-being among assisted living residents: life satisfaction, quality of life, and perception that assisted living feels like home. Data were from 384 assisted living residents interviewed for the Florida Study of As...

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Many scholars have characterized the United States as a welfare state "laggard," less generous than most other nations because of a peculiarly American set of historical circumstances and values. This article explores "American exceptionalism" in the context of welfare state reforms over the past two decades. The authors first describe recent socia...

Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80.1 (2006) 206-207 In the past decade there has appeared a virtual cottage industry of books on the many failed attempts to enact national health insurance across the twentieth century. Yet anyone who wonders whether there is anything new that can be said about this issue must read Alan Derickson's marvelous boo...

Because many older women lack access to private pensions and rely solely on social security income, they are significantly more likely than men to have incomes below or near poverty level. Liberal feminists attribute women's failure to attain pensions to their discontinuous work histories, which preclude them from meeting requirements for length an...

Henry David Thoreau's influential essay “Civil Disobedience,” published in 1849, began with a ringing declaration of opposition to government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I bel...

Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 29.4 (2004) 815-834 In his pathbreaking book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (1982), Paul Starr sought to demonstrate how physicians parlayed their "cultural authority" into social privilege, economic power, and political influence.Starr argued that physicians were able to suppress all chal...

This article uses the 1996 General Social Survey (GSS) and the 1992 National Study of the Changing Workforce (NSCW) to examine two issues: the relationship of work characteristics, family characteristics, and work-family spillover to perceptions of work-family balance; and models of "gender difference" versus "gender similarity." The GSS analysis s...

The United States is the only western industrialized nation that fails to provide universal coverage and the only nation where health care for the majority of the population is financed by for-profit, minimally regulated private insurance companies. These arrangements leave one-sixth of the population uninsured at any given time, and they leave oth...

The paper investigates public attitudes toward welfare state policies as a result of both situational, i.e. unemployment, and ideological factors, i.e. egalitarian ideology, at both the individual and national level. The dependent variables are public support for the sick and the old as well as for the unemployed as target beneficiaries of welfare...

In the post-World War II era the apparent success of Keynesian economic principles in evening out the instabilities of the business cycle stimulated rapid growth in public welfare expenditures in Western capitalist democracies. For social science, welfare state expansion was not a puzzle but a given. When the economic crisis of the 1970s undermined...

The automobile manufacturing and banking industries provide ideal contrasting cases for analysing the changing nature of the employment contract and the resultant effect on older workers. In the auto industry the main thrust of firm activity has been to discard older workers who are viewed as dispensable because of their higher wages and health car...

Why do older Floridians have higher utilization of health care and live longer than other older Americans? Higher health care use among Florida's older residents is likely related to housing patterns, marital status, health insurance coverage, and ethnic composition. Lower mortality is unlikely a result of lifestyle factors or labor-force participa...

This study investigated how changes in Medicare and Medicaid policies affected skilled nursing facility (SNF) revenue streams and resident characteristics in Florida during the 1990s. We used a series of ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models to analyze state-provided administrative data and Online Survey Certification and Reporting (OSCAR)...

We review the main theoretical conclusions from a quarter century of comparative studies of welfare states in the affluent democracies. We contrast early debates over the relative importance of industrialization, economic growth, and social classes for explaining welfare state differences with contemporary claims about the role of globalization, po...

Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation and banned racial discrimination in employment and education, compliance was uneven across institutional spheres. Racial integration proceeded more rapidly and smoothly in the health care system than in other institutions because the new Medicare program, the largest expansion of the welfar...

In the past few decades forces such as globalization and international competition, rising public budgets, and aging populations have caused many nations to reexamine the social programs they established at least a half century ago. Some nations have cut spending; others have reorganized priorities to provide support for dual-earner families, singl...

During the 1980s the news media were filled with reports of soaring unemployment as 'downsizing' and restructuring' became the new buzzwords. Firms managed their workforce reduction by increasing the attractiveness of their pension plans-especially their early-retirement plans. In this volume, the authors examine the U.S. auto industry and present...

Between 1989 and 1994, Disability Insurance and Supplemental Security Income, the 2 federal programs that provide disability benefits, expanded rapidly. The largest growth has been among recipients with mental disorders in the Disability Insurance program and among children with learning disabilities in the Supplemental Security Income program. The...

Although public support for Social Security remains high, confidence in the viability of the program has declined. The decline in confidence reflects confusion generated by public dialogue about various crises, the most recent being the "entitlement crisis." This article discusses two central ideological themes of the entitlement crisis, that entit...

This article examines the distribution of home and community-based services (HCBS) under Florida's Medicaid waiver program. Controlling for personal and community characteristics, it was found that gender and race significantly affect the access of the disabled adult population to HCBS services, with women and nonwhites significantly more likely to...

One of the most remarkable demographic changes in the United States and the rest of the industrialized world during the post-war period has been the trend toward earlier retirement. Older workers, especially men, are leaving the labor force much earlier than they used to. In the U.S., both Social Security and the private pension system have grown a...

The men whose decisions we have been examining were survivors in more than the necessary sense of life expectancy curves. They were also survivors of the jarring, wracking, numbing toil of life on and around the assembly line, making a living for themselves and their families by making cars and trucks for the American consumer—and in the process ma...

In popular imagination the idea of a “pension benefit”—whether the benefit payments of a private-pension scheme or those of a public scheme such as Social Security—most often elicits images of “reward” and “old-age security.” The benefit of a pension is thought to be, at the individual level, a more or less proportionate reward for having completed...

Satisfaction with one’s circumstances of life after leaving the labor force is, at least in general outline, much like one’s satisfaction while still in the labor force. A great deal depends on the material conditions and status characteristics that define capacities, constraints, elasticities, horizons of opportunity and expectation, and various o...

The question itself—“Why retire early?”—is of recent vintage. Although (xcRansom and Sutch 1986) detected evidence of a slight trend toward younger retirement ages prior to 1930, it has been mainly since the 1930s, and still more especially since 1960, that the event of “early retirement” has grown into a phenomenon of considerable size and politic...

The opportunity of a momentous decision—and deciding whether to retire or not, especially whether to retire early, is surely a momentous decision for most people—sometimes comes upon us without forewarning. It is often on such occasions that we appreciate most dearly the value of an informed decision. We think of a host of questions to which we wou...

A “firm”—that is, a signature (firma), the name or title under which a company transacts business—is a legal entity organizing the complex processes by which conflicting interests and objectives of multiple, heterogeneous actors are maintained in a framework of contractual relations of exchange oriented by what the firm defines as a mutually agreed...

During the postwar period (as we recounted in Chapter 2), the UAW and the major automotive manufacturers negotiated a series of contracts which were instrumental in establishing what has sometimes been called “Fordism,” an organizational technology designed to regulate “industrial relations.” Principal features included a closed employment system w...

The main events analyzed later in this book—workers’ decisions about ending their careers in the auto industry via retirement—were most immediately events of personal biography. Workers who had contributed tens of thousands of hours of paid labor time during the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years of employment in the production facilities of General Mo...

In recent decades, the expanded availability of early retirement incentive plans has allowed an increasing number of workers to retire at an age younger than normally allowed by their pension plans. On the surface, these retirement incentives appear to offer older workers more flexibility in deciding when to retire. However, the offer of early reti...

In this paper we examine theoretical arguments about cultural reproduction and resistance in the context of the welfare state. We argue that the welfare slate reproduces gender stratification structurally by replicating a gendered division of labor and culturally by inculcating an ideological framework that sustains that division of labor. We illus...

Welfare states are sets of rules and policies that redistribute resources across social classes and across generations. In nearly all western nations, social spending on the aged has surpassed spending on all other age groups combined. In 1992 alone, spending in the U.S. on Social Security topped $250 billion and on Medicare $130 billion.

It is racism that has undermined the War on Poverty declared by Lyndon Johnson, and the country must come to terms with its history of racism if there is to be any hope of accomplishing welfare reform today. American social policy has continually foundered on issues of race. The antipoverty efforts begun by the Johnson administration were never ful...

I analyze the historical development of the job training programs enacted during the War on Poverty. Combining insights from power resource theory, mass turmoil theory, and the polity-centered approach, I develop a "state transformation " theory. State transformation theory moves beyond the traditional focus of social movement theories on how the s...

With the re-emergence of historical sociology as a dominant focus of inquiry has come a renewed interest in more general methodological, theoretical, and epistemological issues that have long occupied debates about the relationship between history and theory. A recently published article by Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter brings to the fore several...

Examines how the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA) has reduced the flexibility of early retirement programs and made them less efficient in being able to select which workers retire and in managing the number of retirements in a given year. Extensions of the ADEA are reviewed, and the regulation of the labor force through private pensions...

This study describes the income, health, and functional capacity of older Florida residents who fall into the Medicaid gap — those whose incomes are too high to obtain eligibility for Medicaid yet too low to cover the cost of nursing home care as private pay patients — and examines the strategies adopted by their primary caregivers. Our findings su...

The concept of generational equity--that the nation is squandering its wealth on entitlements to the elderly while children remain impoverished--has received considerable media attention. The author traces the source of that message to an organization, Americans for Generational Equity, which is dedicated to restructuring the Social Security system...

The central arguments about the formation of the U.S. welfare state view it as a product of class struggle driven by conflicts between labor and capital over problems of production. The emphasis on class struggle as the central dynamic has led class analyses to ignore a defining feature of social provision: its organization around race and gender....