Imagine a hospital nursery full of newborn babies-- human potential in its earliest forms! But, will that potential they share be realized? For they also share six common risks that can derail the best-laid life plans: birth into a poor family, death of a family breadwinner, ill-health, disability, involuntary unemployment, and outliving one’s retirement savings. Each in its own way burdens—and possibly devastates—unlucky individuals and families both emotionally and financially. It is the rare life that is untouched by one or more of these six threats.

What has America done to protect its citizens and workers should any of these threats materialize? What more might it do? What might it learn from the experience of other nations? How do the answers the nation has given affect contemporary taxation, spending and the economy, as well as the prospects for individual lives?

Social Insurance: America’s Neglected Past and Contested Future answers these questions by describing and analyzing the history, economics, politics and philosophy of America’s most important social insurance programs. It provides a unifying vision of these programs’ purposes, notwithstanding their distinctive institutional structures. It reminds us, amidst the confusing and often apocalyptic rhetoric of conventional political debates why we have the programs and policies we do, and argues for reforms that preserves and enhances the protections in place. Rich in stories, data and analysis, this book will provide students—and citizens—with a strong intellectual foundation for understanding the realities behind the rhetoric—and, perhaps, for thinking more cogently about the risks they will encounter in their own lives.

Part 1: American Social Insurance
     1. Economic Risks and Social Insurance Realities
     2. Assessment of the Six Threats to Family Income
     3. Philosophies, Policies and Public Budgets
     4. The Historical Development of American Social Insurance and its Associated Programs

Part II: The State of American Protections Against the Threats
     5. The Threat of Birth into a Poor Family
     6. The Threat of Early Death of a Family Breadwinner
     7. The Threat of Ill-Health
     8. The Threat of Involuntary Employment
     9. The Threat of Disability
     10. The Threat of Outliving One’s Savings

Part III: Thinking About the Design of Income Security Programs and Their Reform
     11. Accomplishments and Limitations
     12. Social Insurance, Markets and “Modernization”

Theodore R. Marmor is Professor Emeritus of Yale University in three units: the School of Management, the School of Law, and the Department of Political Science. Educated at Harvard University (B.A. and Ph.D.), Marmor was a graduate fellow at Wadham College, Oxford. From 1992 to 2003 he directed the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s post-doctoral program in health policy and social science, and in 2001 the Foundation also awarded him an Investigator Award in Health Policy.

Professor Marmor is primarily a scholar of the modern welfare state, with special emphasis on health and pension issues. The author (or co-author) of thirteen books, he has also published over 200 articles in a wide range of scholarly journals. His opinion essays have appeared in major U.S. newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles and Boston Globe. The second edition of The Politics of Medicare appeared in 2000; the first edition of this book became something of a political science classic and launched his career in health politics, policy, and law. His best known other works include Understanding Health Care Reform (1994), Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not?, (1994), and America’s Misunderstood Welfare State (1992) co-authored with Yale colleagues Jerry Mashaw and Philip Harvey. A collection of his recent articles appeared in 2007: Fads Fallacies and Foolishness in Medical Management and Policy.

Marmor began his public career as a special assistant to Wilbur Cohen (Secretary of HEW) in the mid-1960s. He has been an associate dean of Minnesota’s School of Public Affairs, a faculty member at the University of Chicago, the head of Yale’s Center for Health Studies, a member of President Carter’s Commission on the 1980s Agenda, and a senior social policy advisor to Walter Mondale in the Presidential campaign of 1984. He has testified before Congress about medical care reform, social security, and welfare issues and has been a consultant to governmental and non-profit agencies as well as private firms.

Marmor is a nationally-ranked squash player (in 2009 national champion in the 70+ age division), an avid fly-fisherman, and a committed oenophile. He lives in New York City now, with grandchildren nearby, and is a board member of On Demand Books, a fledgling but innovative firm headed by one of his former students.

Jerry L. Mashaw is Sterling Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he teaches courses on Administrative Law, social welfare policy, regulation, legislation, and the design of public institutions His books include Administrative Law: Introduction to the American Public Law System (6th edition 2009, with Richard Merrill and Peter Shane), Bureaucratic Justice (1983), awarded Harvard University’s Gerard Henderson Memorial Prize in 1993, The Struggle for Auto Safety (with David Harfst 1990), awarded the Sixth Annual Scholarship Prize of the ABA’s Section on Administrative Law and Regulatory Policy in 1992 and Greed, Chaos, and Governance: Using Public Choice to Improve Public Law (1997), awarded the Section’s Twelfth Annual Scholarship Prize in 1998 and the Order of the Order of the Coif Triennial Book Award in 2002 for books published between 1997 and 1999.

John Pakutka is Managing Director of The Crescent Group, an advisory services firm with expertise in healthcare management, policy and litigation. Firm clients have included Fortune 500 companies, Global 100 law firms, health systems, investment banks, state governments and the United States Department of Justice. Prior to founding The Crescent Group, he completed employment stints at Exxon/Reliance Electric, the United States Government Accountability Office, Yale University, and APM/Computer Sciences Corporation. He has served on numerous public and non-profit boards and commissions, most recently the Connecticut State Legislature’s Task Force on Small Business Health Costs and the Citizenship Fund of the Connecticut Secretary of the State. He holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Cornell and a Masters in Public and Private Management from Yale, where he lectures annually in the Product Planning class at the School of Management. He is a proud member of the Sorin Society of the University of Notre Dame and Fleur-de-Lis Society of Bon Secours. Though a native of Duryea, Pennsylvania and Vestal, New York, he lives with his wife and partner Christine, and three young children, Noah, Elaina, and Isabella, on the beautiful Connecticut shoreline.