Jacob Hacker: All Publications, Events and Press

Jacob Hacker in CQPolitics | 'The Crisis of Choice'

Communications — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 08:25:00 -0400

New America in the News:

...Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at the University of California Berkeley and author of “The Great Risk Shift,” said Democratic leaders have been frustrated by several factors since taking the majority of the House and Senate after the 2006 elections: comparatively thin majorities, especially in the Senate; their insistence on adhering to pay-as-you-go budget rules that often require tax increases to support any substantial new spending; and the fact that relief bills such as the housing measure are limited in scope and largely throw money at a problem, instead of solving it.

“If the major issue for middle-class Americans is the loss of overall value in their homes, helping people refinance and stay in their houses won’t fundamentally alter those concerns,” Hacker said. “You probably need to do more and create a new financial structure around housing because it’s so important to middle-class security, say by shoring up unemployment insurance and helping states deal with the effects of downturns...” LINK

Jacob Hacker in San Francisco Chronicle | 'Comfortable Retirement a Fading Dream for Many'

Communications — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:58:00 -0400

New America in the News:
"People value the idea of a period beyond their work life," said Yale University political scientist Jacob Hacker, who has studied U.S. pension and health care policies. "Retirement was the victory of the affluent society over the need to be a cog in the machine your whole working life..." LINK

Are You Confused Yet?

Ron Tang — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 05:49:00 -0400

Polls show that health care ranks near the top of voters’ concerns, especially among Democrats. And for those who say “the economy” is the top issue, health care is usually a major part of their financial worries.

And yet, voters must be awfully confused about where the Democrats stand on health care. On the one hand, both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton say they want to insure everyone -- and in much the same way. On the other hand, they are beating each other up at every turn. Before the Pennsylvania primary, Mr. Obama ran yet another ad arguing… more

Let's Try a Dose. We're Bound To Feel Better.

Ron Tang — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 07:20:00 -0400

"Socialized medicine" is the bogeyman that just won't die. The epithet has been hurled at every national health plan since the New Deal -- even Medicare, which critics warned would strip Americans of their freedom.

And now it's back. Republicans from President Bush on down have invoked the specter of socialism in denouncing Democrats' attempts to expand publicly funded health insurance for children. Erstwhile GOP presidential contenders Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney lambasted the health plans of the leading Democratic candidates for mimicking "the socialist solution they have in Europe" (Giuliani) and trying to impose "a European-style socialized medicine plan" (Romney).… more

Competing Prescriptions

Ron Tang — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 10:39:00 -0400

With the March 4 primaries delivering finality on one side of the partisan divide and uncertainty on the other, it’s a good time to take stock of where the candidates are on health care. For now, most attention has centered on the scrap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama over an “individual mandate” requiring everyone to have health insurance. But this fight will look like a college seminar discussion compared with the take-no-prisoners battle that’s likely to emerge between John McCain and whomever the Democrats eventually nominate.

That’s because, when it comes to health care, Republicans are from Mars and Democrats… more

Shannon Brownlee, Jacob Hacker in Chrisitan Science Monitor | 'Arguments for a National Healthcare System'

Communications — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 10:52:00 -0500

New America in the News:

Arguments Mount for a National Healthcare System (Christian Science Monitor)

...In the current campaign season, Senator McCain calls for dozens of reforms to bring down costs and make expenditures more effective in health results. And he states, "we can and must provide access to healthcare for all our citizens." His proposals, though, don't fully embrace the uninsured.

Shannon Brownlee, a senior fellow at the centrist New America Foundation, charges that McCain is "so wedded to the free market that he fails to recognize that there has been market failure" in the healthcare industry.

Democratic presidential candidates Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama are more ambitious in their proposed reforms than McCain. They both promise, if elected, to provide guaranteed, affordable care for all Americans.

Both of their proposals have taken key elements from a plan of Jacob Hacker, a political scientist at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. Professor Hacker's template, outlined in an Economic Policy Institute briefing paper, notes: "America's $2.2 trillion-a-year medical complex is enormously wasteful, ill-targeted, inefficient, and unfair. The best medical care is extremely good, but the Rube Goldberg system through which that care is financed is extremely bad – and falling apart." He calls the runaway costs a "grave threat" to the security of family finances and to corporate America's bottom line.

The Hacker plan combines the current employer-based system with a new federally administered insurance pool similar to Medicare, the popular program for older Americans. This new pool would be funded by premiums and copays charged to individuals and employers who sign up, as well as government subsidies. Individuals would automatically be enrolled, either at work or when they seek care. Premiums would be capped, with subsidies for lower-income families. ...

Hacker was delighted last month when an analysis of his plan by the Lewis Group, a nonpartisan consulting group, held that his proposal would cover 99.6 percent of all Americans without raising total national health spending. Indeed, it would save more than $1 trillion over 10 years, the report held.

None of the leading presidential candidates call for a single-payer system, as in Canada. That may be in part political expediency, considering what is possible. Republicans sometimes call Democrat health plans "socialized medicine." ...

Hacker doubts if Americans would go "in one fell swoop" for a single-payer system where individuals choose their own doctors, but government pays the bill. ...

Canada, says Ms. Brownlee, author of a new book, "Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer," spends about 16 percent of every dollar on administrative costs.

A Mandate isn't Mandatory

Ron Tang — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

As the primary fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama reaches fever pitch, the domestic policy battle has boiled down to a single technical phrase: "individual mandate."

Clinton's healthcare plan includes such a mandate, requiring that everyone obtain health coverage. Obama's does not (though he does require that children get coverage). This difference, Clinton is insisting, is reason enough for anyone who wants universal coverage to support her. As Clinton argued in last Thursday's debate: "If you do not have a plan that starts out attempting to achieve universal healthcare, you will be nibbled to death, and we will be… more

America’s Changing Social Contract

adminn — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/03/2007 - 9:00am

Despite the sustained economic growth of recent years, Americans are increasingly concerned with economic security. Even before economists began reporting signs of recession, skyrocketing health care costs, faltering pensions, and burgeoning inequality frayed the fabric of the American social contract. America's social contract is an evolving, complex web of legal and informal relationships between households, employers, government, and civil society that extends beyond particular federal programs. Now is the time to strike a new bargain between these sectors, rethinking the rights and responsibilities of each. Breathing new life into the American social contract is needed to keep pace with our 21st century economy and build the conditions for sustained growth and healthy families.

On Dec. 3, the New America Foundation convened 200 guests at the Mayflower Hotel to explore the intellectual framework of the next social contract. Andy Stern, President of the SEIU, and Carl Camden, CEO of Kelly Services, began the conversation by outlining the promise and the challenges that this coming social contract will encounter. Speaking from the divergent sectors of labor, business and the growing contingent workforce, both leaders issued bold calls for reform and reflected on the turbulent economic challenges that the America social contract faces. Mr. Stern addressed the rights and responsibilities of workers and employers, particularly the important realms of pensions and health care. Mr. Camden offered the perspective of the millions of American temporary and freelance workers and comment on the promise and innovation of flexible, citizen-based benefits.

In response to these opening remarks was a panel discussion to further hash out the rights and responsibilities of employers. Michael Calabrese, Joe Minarik, Donna Klein, and Thomas Kochan addressed the particular responsibilities such as child care and workplace flexibility, the importance of wages and benefits providing for basic economic security, and their potential burden on the global economic competitiveness of American firms.

Next, Brian Gallagher and Diana Aviv offered their perspective on the role of civil society, in a discussion moderated by Michael Lipsky. They focused on the key issues of shared responsibility, wealth, and philanthropy in the social contract. It is important for the social contract to provide certain goods outside of the purview of government, and panel clarified the role of civil society in performing this task.

During a lunchtime conversation, Michael Lind offered a global view of the social contract and how it evolves over time. Mr. Lind articulated the logic of one of the next social contract’s bedrock principles: that the grand bargain between citizens be citizen-based.

Mark Schmitt led a panel on the role of government, including Jacob Hacker, Karen Kornbluh, William Galston, and Reihan Salam. They discussed the government’s role in providing economic security to citizens, the increasing risk and uncertainty that Americans families face, and how confronting these challenges with the language of the social contract can transform our politics.

Finally, David Gray, along with a panel of Jane Waldfogel, Phil Longman, Kelleen Kaye, and Christine Kim discussed the role of the family in the social contract. Changes in the workforce and demography create challenges for government and business to help families balance work and life. Together, the panelists discussed what the status of the two-parent family is in America, what challenges young adult parents face, and where family formation and choices in child rearing intersect with policy.

The event agenda can be found below. Video of the first half of this all-day event is available at right; the afternoon sessions can be viewed by clicking here. An MP3 audio recording of the complete event can be played below, or downloaded via this link.

The Next Social Contract Initiative aims to reinvent American social policy for the twenty-first century. Through a program of research and public education, the initiative will explore the origins of our modern social contract, articulate the guiding principles for constructing a new contract, and advance a set of promising policy reforms. To learn more about this initiative, please click here.

Jacob Hacker in Slate Magazine on Health Reform Struggles

Communications — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:02:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Slate Magazine examines the term socialized medicine. This label is known to have slain past health care proposals, and it was used most recently by 2008 GOP frontrunner Rudy Giuliani to denounce Democratic candidates' plans to fix the healthcare system. The following is an excerpt from "Who's Afraid of Socialized Medicine?":

... In 1994 the term socialized medicine was heard less often than in previous battles. One of the few who used it was Clinton, when he donned Truman's mantle to deride those critics of the former president who had stooped to use what Clinton implied was a shrill and overwroughtcharge. ("What did they say? 'Harry Truman's a radical liberal. He's for socialized medicine.' Well, the truth is, Harry Truman had this old-fashioned notion that people who work hard and play by the rules ought to help one another.") To be sure, Republicans made hay with less archaic-sounding phrases such as the "government takeover of the health care system" (even though Clinton's plan relied more on market mechanisms than on government ukases). Newt Gingrich, then House minority whip, blasted Clinton's plan as a throwback to the kind of "centralized, command bureaucracies" that were dying across Eastern Europe.

But if these attacks ginned up some hostility to Clinton's plan, the real problem was more fundamental. As political scientist Jacob Hacker has argued, the basic obstacle was nothing less than the government's failure to have adopted a comprehensive health insurance plan decades earlier. As a result, the system that emerged by 1994 entailed such a crazy quilt of private interests corporations, small firms, insurers, doctors, unions, HMOs, and so onthat moving all Americans into a new framework without worsening anyone's situation had become virtually impossible. Many of these interest groups (including doctors) actually favored reform in the abstract. But no particular plan was going to please them all.

Perhaps, then, the socialized medicine scare tactic really has run its course. The Republicans' decision to dust it off for one more battle may say more about their party's continued sprint to the right-wing extreme than about any intrinsic public hostility to government social programs. If this is the case, then Democrats might be wise to offer health-care proposals that don't upend the status quo, while brushing off the socialized medicine attacks as atavistic Cold War-era alarmism. Which seems to be, for the moment, precisely what they're doing.

Jacob Hacker is a Fellow with New America Foundation. For the direct link to this article, please visit Slate.com.

Employee Benefit Adviser Interviews Jacob Hacker on Middle Class

Communications — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 13:15:00 -0400

New America in the News:

Many Americans appear to be doing fine. They’ve got nice cars. They’ve got good jobs. They’ve got families. But they also have an abysmal savings profile and mountains of debt. The slightest disruption — a job loss or health incident — can and does destroy the perceived image of American middle class harmony.

In “The Great Risk Shift,” author Jacob Hacker details how beneath the shiny hardwood flooring of America’s middle class there is a rotted infrastructure that is ready to give out at any moment. He says that in order to prevent such a catastrophe workers need to spurn the ownership society, which heralded the loss of stable retirement benefits and comprehensive health care coverage, and reclaim the hallmarks of security and opportunity that have slowly decayed over the last 50 years.

“We’re losing the language of security and it’s time to reclaim it,” Hacker recently told Employee Benefit Adviser during a telephone conversation with Editor Robert L. Whiddon. Hacker, a professor of political science at Yale University, argues that universal 401(k)s, an expanded Medicare program and individual stop-loss insurance — to protect middle class workers from severe disruptions in earnings or catastrophic health care expenses — are necessary to ensure a prosperous and secure American workforce.

Q:You seem very young to write this book. Unlike many Gen Xers (myself included) you refuse to simply give up on the notion of a traditional “retirement.” The book ends by exhorting readers to get mad, get wise and get even.

A: What you describe, your attitude of resignation and acceptance is true of a lot of people in our generation. If you look at the polling, the people that are most up in arms about the loss of secure retirement benefits, the decline of comprehensive health benefits or rising college costs are people actually in the generation ahead of us who have seen both sides of the equation and who feel like something is being lost. Whereas you look at young Americans, particularly Gen Y if you will, people in the youngest age group in the labor market are resigned and indeed feel as if they just have to construct their own life independent of these promises.

What I’m trying to do in the book is say, look we’re at a pretty critical turning point and we can either accept that we are going to lose any guarantee of security and we’re all going to try and make it on our own, or we’re going to try and reclaim some of the best elements of that tradition...

For the complete interview, please visit the Employee Benefit Adviser website.

Reform Beyond Access

Articles — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:02:00 -0500

Health reform is back on the agenda, and not a moment too soon. U.S. health financing is a costly mess that is putting more and more Americans and their employers at risk. Yet nothing guarantees that the burgeoning debate over healthcare will end differently from past debates. The U.S. has witnessed epic healthcare battles roughly once every 15 years -- most recently the Clinton plan of the early 1990s. Yet with the exception of the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, each of these struggles has ended in political gridlock.

The stakes are too high to allow gridlock again.

Now… more

Jacob Hacker's Testimony Before the House Ways and Means Committee on the Economic Challenges Facing Middle Class Families

adminn — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:38:00 -0500

Universal Risk Insurance

adminn — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 09:57:00 -0500

In recent decades there has been a massive transfer of economic risk from shared institutional arrangements, such as unemployment insurance and basic benefit coverage provided by employers, onto the fragile balance sheets of families. Yet public programs have largely failed to respond.

"Universal Insurance" is a new response to this growing problem. It would provide short-term, stop-loss protection to families whose income (after taxes and public benefits) suddenly decline by a fifth or more due to job loss or catastrophic health expenses. All but the richest families would be eligible, but the program would be most generous for low-income families.… more

The New Economic Insecurity -- And What Can Be Done About It

Articles — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 03:56:00 -0500

Over the past generation, the economic risks American families face have increased substantially. Yet public programs have largely failed to adapt to these new and newly intensified risks, and private workplace benefits have eroded. As a result, Americans increasingly find themselves on an economic tightrope, without an adequate safety net if, as is ever more likely, they lose their footing. This tightrope both creates anxiety about the future and causes hardship when families do lose their balance. But importantly, it also threatens opportunity by making it more difficult for families to feel sufficiently secure to look confidently toward the future… more

Enter Center

Articles — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 16:25:00 -0500

Last year, we published a book called Off Center, in which we argued that Republicans were governing well to the right of the U.S. electorate -- and getting away with it. Americans, we wrote, remained resolutely centrist and, if anything, had moved slightly leftward in recent years. But Republicans had managed to translate their razor-thin electoral margins into a well-financed political machine that pushed policy to the right while providing Republicans with what we called "backlash insurance" -- the capacity to protect GOP incumbents against voter retaliation for their extreme positions.

Backlash insurance had worked so well for so long that… more

The Rise of the Office-Park Populist

Articles — Sun, 24 Dec 2006 21:34:00 -0500

On Election Day last month, Democratic candidates did something they haven't done for a while: they decisively won the middle class. Middle-income voters -- including white, middle-income voters who have abandoned the party in droves in recent years -- preferred Democratic candidates by wide margins. Indeed, only voters with family incomes in excess of $100,000 a year were more likely to support Republicans than Democrats in House races in November.

The conventional view among the pundit class is that this middle-class restoration, valuable as it was for Democrats, creates thorny new tensions. Motivated mainly by their disgust with corruption, incompetence and… more

It Wasn’t Just Iraq

Articles — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 08:01:00 -0500

Just about everyone understands the importance of Iraq to the Democrats’ success in the 2006 midterm elections. Far fewer, we suspect, understand that the Democrats owe a good chunk of their 2006 success to an issue that has historically been one of their strongest: the economy.

Throughout the campaign, polls regularly indicated that the economy was the second most important concern of voters (behind Iraq); polls taken in the last weekend by Pew, ABC News/Washington Post and Newsweek confirmed this. On Election Day, 39 percent of voters deemed the economy “extremely important” to their House vote, and those voters backed… more

It's Not the Economy, Stupid

Articles — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 06:50:00 -0500

In the final days of this fall’s campaign, Republicans have turned to an unexpected issue: the economy. President Bush touted the nation’s prosperity last week, insisting that "a strong economy is going to help our candidates."

And why not? The Dow is soaring. Unemployment is low. Inflation is tame. Gas prices are falling. And the overall economy has been growing steadily. If Americans practice what political scientists call "retrospective voting" (captured by President Ronald Reagan’s famous question: "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?"), then one would think that incumbent politicians should be cruising to victory.… more

Till Debt Do Us Part?

Articles — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 06:05:00 -0400

Amid the hype about the birth of the 300 millionth American last week, a bigger population milestone was largely ignored. For the first time, according to the Census Bureau, households headed by single people outnumber those headed by married ones.

It may seem unromantic, but marriage has always been a vital economic institution as well as a social one. A marriage is, among many things, a contract to secure the welfare of an economic unit that, in most cases, includes children. The tale of the last generation is how the value of that contract has declined, while its costs and risks… more

Jacob Hacker Interviewed on New Book by The Oregonian

Communications — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 19:40:00 -0400

New America in the News:

To hear Jacob Hacker talk, U.S. workers are increasingly being asked to become actuaries for their own economic doom.

Pension plans are evaporating. Health-insurance costs are climbing. More than ever, incomes rise and fall from year to year.

The American middle class feels more on the edge of financial ruin than any time since World War II.

Why? That's the subject of Hacker's new book, "The Great Risk Shift" (Oxford University Press, $26).

The Yale University political science professor and native Oregonian's theory is simple: Government, corporations and insurers once shouldered the costs of workers' retirement, health care and job security. No more, Hacker says. Increasingly, families carry those risks, and they're growing ever-more weary and financially incapable of doing so.

An example: The proportion of families earning between $20,000 and $40,000, without health insurance, has risen from 25 percent in 2000 to nearly 40 percent, he says. "We're seeing problems that were once really confined to the very bottom of our economic pyramid moving up to affect the middle class," he says...

Q: So, there's unrest among the public, but that's not being transferred into political debate?

A: It may be soon. The economy is actually featuring more prominently in this election than the many pundits would have expected. There's a lot of reasons why politicians have not talked about this.

The way we think about what's happened in the economy is always in terms of inequality, the growing gap between the rich and the poor. But what I show in the book is that insecurity or instability of income has risen faster than inequality in the United States.

Family incomes of college-educated people are now as unstable as the family incomes of high school dropouts were in the 1970s...

For the complete interview, please visit The Oregonian website.