World War II forced extensive and comprehensive social and political changes on nations across the globe. This comparative examination of health insurance in the United States and Japan during and after the war explores how WWII shaped the health care systems of both countries.Takakazu Yamagishi discusses the effect of total war on the development of health insurance in both countries and compares the two using four measures: political structure, the power of interest groups, the existing political culture, and policy feedback. During the war, the U.S. and Japanese governments realized that healthy soldiers, workers, mothers, and children were vital to national survival. While both countries adopted new, expansive national insurance policies as part of their WWII mobilization efforts, they approached doing so in different manners and achieved near opposite results. In the U.S., private insurance became the predominant means of insuring people, save for a few government-run programs. Japan, meanwhile, created a near-universal public insurance system. After the war, the nations further consolidated their respective insurance policy. Yamagishi argues that these disparate outcomes were the result of each nation's war experience. He looks closely at postwar Japan and investigates how struggles between the American occupation authority and U.S. domestic forces, such as the American Medical Association, actually helped solidify the country's existing health insurance system.Original and tightly argued, this volume makes a strong case for treating total war as a central factor in understanding how the health insurance systems of the two nations grew while bearing in mind the dual nature of government intervention -- however slight -- in health care. Those interested in debates about health care in industrialized countries and scholars of comparative political development especially will appreciate and learn from Yamagishi's study.
Preface Acknowledgments Introduction Part I: Prewar Development of Health Insurance 1. Learning from Germany: Japan before 1937 2. Catching Up with Europe: The United States before 1941 Part II: Health Security as National Security 3. Creating a Public Health Insurance System: Japan, 1937 1945 4. Forming a Hybrid Health Insurance System: The United States, 1941 1945 Part III: Health Insurance in the Postwar Period 5. Consolidating the Hybrid Health Insurance System: The United States, 1945 1952 6. Restoring the Public Health Insurance System: Japan, 1945 1952 Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
""Historical investigation and international comparative analysis are two major approaches among the forces in the field, and Takakazu Yamagishi's War and Health Insurance Policy in Japan and the United States: World War II to Postwar Reconstruction has combined those two methodologies to produce a sharply focused, beautifully constructed, and clearly argued explanation of this historical making of the systems or medical insurance in Japan and the United States... Yamagishi has produced a wonderful book... The book will serve as one of the best introductions to the making of health care policies in the two countries and as a starting point to develop a more inclusive account of the paths to the different medical systems in two countries that face each other across the Pacific.""
