scholarly journals Rights to Healthcare in the United States: Inherently Unstable

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 326-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Orentlicher

Although international covenants have long recognized a fundamental right to healthcare, and other countries provide healthcare coverage for all of their citizens, rights to healthcare in the United States have been adopted only grudgingly, and in a manner that is inherently unstable. While a solid right to healthcare would provide much benefit to individuals and society, the political and judicial branches of the U.S. government have granted rights that are incomplete and vulnerable to erosion over time.Unfortunately, enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) does not change these fundamental weaknesses in the regime of U.S. healthcare rights. Millions of Americans will remain uninsured after ACA takes full effect, and rather than creating a more stable right to healthcare, ACA gives unstable rights to more people. As a result, even if ACA survives its constitutional challenges, access to healthcare still will be threatened by the potential for attrition of the rights that ACA provides.

Economies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franklin G. Mixon ◽  
Chandini Sankaran ◽  
Kamal P. Upadhyaya

This study extends the political science and political psychology literature on the political ideology of lawmakers by addressing the following question: How stable is a legislator’s political ideology over time? In doing so, we employ Nokken–Poole scores of legislators’ political ideology for members of the United States (U.S.) House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate who were elected prior to the 103rd Congress that began in early 1991 and who served consecutively through the 115th Congress, which ended in early 2019. Results from individual time-series estimations suggest that political ideology is unstable over time for a sizable portion of the members of both major political parties who serve in the U.S. Congress, while analysis of the pooled data suggests that, after accounting for inertia in political ideology and individual legislator effects, Republican legislators become more conservative over time. These results run somewhat counter to the finding in prior studies that the political ideologies of lawmakers and other political elites are stable over time.


2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-327 ◽  
Author(s):  
OR BASSOK

AbstractAs long as the American Constitution serves as the focal point of American identity, many constitutional interpretative theories also serve as roadmaps to various visions of American constitutional identity. Using the debate over the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, I expose the identity dimension of various interpretative theories and analyse the differences between the roadmaps offered by them. I argue that according to each of these roadmaps, courts’ authority to review legislation is required in order to protect a certain vision of American constitutional identity even at the price of thwarting Americans’ freedom to pursue their current desires. The conventional framing of interpretative theories as merely techniques to decipher the constitutional text or justifications for the Supreme Court’s countermajoritarian authority to review legislation and the disregard of their identity function is perplexing in view of the centrality of the Constitution to American national identity. I argue that this conventional framing is a result of the current understanding of American constitutional identity in terms of neutrality toward the question of the good. This reading of the Constitution as lacking any form of ideology at its core makes majority preferences the best take of current American identity, leaving constitutional theorists with the mission to justify the Court’s authority to diverge from majority preferences.


2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-106
Author(s):  
Khaled Elgindy

This essay looks at the hearing held by the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in April 1922 on the subject of a Jewish National Home in Palestine, as well as the broader congressional debate over the Balfour Declaration at that crucial time. The landmark hearing, which took place against the backdrop of growing unrest in Palestine and just prior to the League of Nations' formal approval of Britain's Mandate over Palestine, offers a glimpse into the cultural and political mindset underpinning U.S. support for the Zionist project at the time as well as the ways in which the political discourse in the United States has, or has not, changed since then. Despite the overwhelming support for the Zionist project in Congress, which unanimously endorsed Balfour in September 1922, the hearing examined all aspects of the issue and included a remarkably diverse array of viewpoints, including both anti-Zionist Jewish and Palestinian Arab voices.


1999 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-24
Author(s):  
Richard L Clarke

U.S. maritime unions have played a vital historical role in both the defense and the economic development of the United States. The economic and the political forces that helped shape and promote the growth of U.S. seafaring labor unions changed dramatically in the 1990s. Maritime union membership in the United States has fallen by more than 80 per cent since 1950. Inflexible union work rules and high union wage scales have contributed to this decline. Recent regulatory and industry changes require a new union approach if U. S. maritime unions are to survive the next decade.


Author(s):  
Noel Maurer

This introductory chapter discusses the shift from politicized confrontations like the imbroglio of 1900 to legalized disputes like the more orderly affair of 2007. It advances four basic findings. First, American government intervention on behalf of U.S. foreign investors was astoundingly successful at extracting compensation through the 1980s. Second, American domestic interests trumped strategic concerns again and again, for small economic gains relative to the U.S. economy and the potential strategic losses. Third, the United States proved unable to impose institutional reform in Latin America and West Africa even while American agents were in place. Finally, the technology that the U.S. government used to protect American property rights overseas changed radically over time.


2020 ◽  
pp. 97-117
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter focuses on the role of copper policies in the relations between the United States and Chile during the Frei administration, especially as they relate to the developmental efforts of the Christian Democratic project. During the Frei administration, the political debate on copper policies reached a climax. Since U.S. capitals were among the most significant actors in the story, the discussions around the issue of copper converged with the ideological visions of the United States and the Cold War held by the different Chilean political parties. As the Frei administration tried to introduce the most comprehensive and consistent reform around the structure of the property of the Gran Minería del Cobre, the forces in competition in the arena of Chilean politics stood by their ideological convictions, regarding both copper and the United States, in their opposition or grudging support for the policies proposed by the Christian Democratic government. Moreover, the U.S. government became deeply involved in the matter of copper in Chile, first by pressuring the Chilean government into rolling back a price increase in 1965 and then, mostly through the personal efforts of Ambassador Edward Korry, by mediating in the negotiation between the Frei administration and Anaconda on the nationalization of the U.S. company's largest mine, Chuquicamata, in 1969.


1991 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-16
Author(s):  
David Rymph ◽  
Linda Little

Washington, D.C., like many major cities in the U.S., has experienced a large influx of illegal immigrants in the past decade. Hundreds of thousands of Hispanics have entered the United States, many of them fleeing from the political violence in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Washington metropolitan area may have as many as 80,000 refugees from El Salvador alone.


2000 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 3-20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Alesina

Current surpluses in the U.S. have been achieved by a combination of a strong economy, low interest rates, and sharp cuts in defense spending. These surpluses follow a period (the 1980s) of rather exceptional budget deficit. This paper investigates the origin, size, and expected future patterns of the U.S. budget balance. It discusses how different political forces may generate alternative fiscal scenarios for the U.S. in the next decade.


Daedalus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
pp. 48-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Tienda ◽  
Susana M. Sánchez

This essay provides an overview of immigration from Latin America since 1960, focusing on changes in both the size and composition of the dominant streams and their cumulative impact on the U.S. foreign-born population. We briefly describe the deep historical roots of current migration streams and the policy backdrop against which migration from the region surged. Distinguishing among the three major pathways to U.S. residence – family sponsorship, asylum, and unauthorized entry – we explain how contemporary flows are related both to economic crises, political conflicts, and humanitarian incidents in sending countries, but especially to idiosyncratic application of existing laws over time. The concluding section highlights the importance of investing in the children of immigrants to meet the future labor needs of an aging nation.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Sprows Cummings

Canonization, the process by which the Catholic Church names saints, may be fundamentally about holiness, but it is never only about holiness. In the United States, it was often about the ways in which Catholics defined, defended, and celebrated their identities as Americans. This book traces saint-seeking in the United States from the 1880s, the decade in which U.S. Catholics nominated their first candidates for canonization, to 2015, the year Pope Francis named the twelfth American saint in the first such ceremony held on U.S. soil. It argues that U.S. Catholics’ search for a saint of their own sprung from a desire to persuade the Vatican to recognize their country’s holy heroes. But Rome was not U.S. saint-seekers only audience. For the U.S. Catholic faithful, saints served not only as mediators between heaven and earth, but also between the faith they professed and the American culture in which they lived. This panoramic view of American sanctity, focused on figures at the nexus of holiness and U.S. history, this book explores U.S. Catholics’ understanding of themselves both as members of the church and as citizens of the nation—and reveals how those identities converged, diverged, and changed over time.


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