Presidential Healthcare Reform Rhetoric

This book analyzes the rhetorical strategies employed by the four Democratic presidents, Truman, Johnson, Clinton and Obama, who tried to expand access to and affordability of healthcare in the United States. It considers how they made such arguments, the ethics they advanced, and the vision of America they espoused. The author combines rhetoric analysis, policy analysis, and policy history to illuminate the dynamic nature of the way American presidents have imagined the moral and social bonds of the American people and their exhortations for governance and policy to reflect and honor these bonds and obligations. Schimmel illustrates how Democratic presidents invoke positive liberty and communitarian values in direct challenge to opposing conservative ideologies of limited government and prioritization of negative liberty and their increasing prominence in the post-Reagan era. He also draws attention to the ethical and policy compromises entailed by the usage of specific rhetoricalstrategies and their resulting discursive effects.

“Noam Schimmel’s Presidential Healthcare Reform Rhetoric provides an historical, political, and moral analysis of why the issue of state-sponsored health care has become a pivotal part of the limited-versus-big government debate. … the book provides a systematic scrutiny of how the health care–related rhetoric of these presidents transformed from an issue emphasizing obligation and rights to one centering on efficiency and individual responsibility.” (Jae Sik Ha, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48 (3), September, 2018)

“This is a milestone in rhetoric analysis and healthcare policy studies. It is the first of its kind to examine historical change in presidential discourse on healthcare. It is also the first to trace down and map out how historical change in healthcare discourse is associated with broader change in American political culture, moral norms, and social imaginaries. And it does so in a rhetorical style that is itself eloquent, precise, and persuasive. A must-read.” (Professor Lilie Chouliaraki, London School of Economics, UK)

“Contrasting the broader, more organic conception of the state as articulated by Presidents Truman and Johnson, with a more limited version espoused by Presidents Clinton and Obama, Schimmel uses health reform as an able foil to get at deeper skirmishes in a divided society. We would all do well to listen as carefully to our elected leaders as Dr. Schimmel does.” (Professor Jonathan Engel, CUNY, USA)

“Noam Schimmel shows how the way we talk about American social policy has changed dramatically over the last 70 years -- from talk of rights and moral obligation to talk of efficiency and individual responsibility. Through the prism of health care policy, we see vividly how profoundly the conservatism of the 1970s and 1980s has affected Americans' view of themselves and their society.”  (Professor Emeritus David Zarefsky, Northwestern University, USA)

“Noam Schimmel has written a genuinely innovative book on the history of American disputes over what used to be known as national health insurance. Combining the scholarship of rhetoric with political portraiture of the moral and practical presumptions of reformers and their critics, Schimmel has informed our understanding by exposing the assumptions of Presidents from Truman to Obama.” (Professor Emeritus Theodore Marmor, Yale University, USA)

“Noam Schimmel's cogently argued and elegantly written monograph casts important light on the rhetorical strategies liberalDemocratic presidents have employed to justify healthcare reform against conservative critiques of big government.  A must read book for students of the presidency and an important contribution to political science.” (Professor Iwan Morgan, University College London, UK)

Noam Schimmel is Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford University, UK, and Associate Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, McGill University, Canada. He earned his interdisciplinary PhD in Media and Communication, incorporating political science, public policy, and human rights from the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on the politics, ethics, and practice of human rights, and his articles have appeared in a range of journals of political science, human rights, development, and education.