The rise and resounding demise of the Clinton plan.

Prologue: The great health reform debate of 1994 ended with a whimper, on the heels of an election that turned out the powerful Democratic majority in the House and Senate and sent some of its most influential members packing. What role did health care reform play in this turning of political fortunes? Was it the unwitting victim? Or was it, in fact, the catalyst? In this paper Theda Skocpol argues that the political reversal of the November 1994 elections might turn out to be one of the biggest turning points in twentieth-century American history and that, far from being a mere casualty, the Clinton plan and Congress's failure to adopt it (or anything else) contributed materially to the revolt of the electorate. This is ironic, Skocpol notes, because the Clinton plan was itself designed as a middle-of-the-road compromise between the market-based and the regulation-based reforms that had been discussed up to that point. The demise of the Clinton plan is notable, she writes, not just as an attempted policy...