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 rhetorical strategies and their resulting discursive effects.

Autorentext

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.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements.- Table of Contents.- Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: History of American Liberal and Conservative Healthcare Rhetoric and Public Policy.- Chapter 3: Methodology and Theory: The Social Imaginary and its Moral Order.- Chapter 4: Harry Truman's November 19, 1945 Address to Congress on Healthcare Reform.- Chapter 5: Lyndon Baines Johnson's Remarks at the Signing of the Medicare Bill, July 30, 1965 and Related Speeches.- Chapter 6: Bill Clinton's September 22, 1993 Address on Healthcare Reform to Congress.- Chapter 7: Barack Obama's September 9, 2009 Healthcare Speech to Congress.- Chapter 8: Conclusion.-* *Bibliography.