Abstract
Anyone reading this book most likely gets five or six—or maybe even fifty—emails every day from one organization or another asking you to take some political action—sign a petition, send an email, make a phone call, join a rally, protest or march, or lobby a member of Congress.
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Notes
On the growth of liberal grassroots advocacy groups, see Jeffrey Berry, The Interest Group Society (Boston: Little Brown, 1984);
and Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Oklahoma City: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004).
On the conservative response, see Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
The two most important books on grassroots advocacy tend to focus on the efforts of grassroots activists to pressure legislators who would otherwise oppose them, giving less attention to the more subtle ways of influencing legislators I present here: Ken Kollman, Outside Lobbying (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998);
and Kenneth M. Goldstein, Interest Groups, Lobbying, and Participation in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
David Mayhew, Congress: The Electoral Connection (New Haven: Yale, 1974).
Richard Kirsch, “Will it be Déjà Vu All Over Again? Renewing the Fight for Health Care for All: Tales, Hopes and Fears of a Battle- Scarred Organizer,” last modified March 2003, accessed December 17, 2012, http://hcfan.3cdn.net/153ca35072e7afc5b8_vam6bnd6n.pdf;
Jacob S. Hacker, “Medicare Plus: Increasing Health Care Coverage by Expanding Medicare” in Covering America: Real Remedies for the Uninsured, edited by Elliot K. Wicks (Washington, DC: Economic and Social Research Institute, June 2001), 75–100, accessed February 10, 2012, http://www.esreserch.org/RWJ11PDF/full_document.pdf.
This is not the place to go into details of the ACA, but it fundamentally changes the business model of private insurance. The guaranteed issue requirement, the provisions that require insurance companies to spend a minimal percentage of their premiums on health care, the provisions that limit their ability to deny people coverage or care on the basis of preexisting conditions and that limit how premiums may vary on the basis of age and gender, and the various provisions that require them to provide free preventative health care and health insurance to children under the age of 26 will gradually reduce health insurance company profits. Indeed, analysts from all across the political spectrum believe that profits will be driven so low that the insurance companies will eventually leave the market to Accountable Care Organizations and other new, mostly nonprofit entities. See Ezekiel J. Emanuel and Jeffrey B. Liebman, “The End of Health Insurance Companies,” last modified January 30, 2012, accessed June 11, 2012, http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/30/the-end-of-health-insurance-companies;
Rick Ungar, “More Proof that the American For-Profit Health Insurance Model Is Doomed,” accessed June 11, 2012, http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/12/28/more-proof-that-the-american-for-profit-health-insurance-model-is-doomed.
This conflict is well described by Starr, Remedy and Reaction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
Richard Kirsch, Fighting for Our Health (Albany, NY: The Rockefeller Institute Press, 2011), 100.
Richard Fenno, Homestyle: House Members in their Districts (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978).
James Q. Wilson, Political Organizations (New York: Basic Books, 1973);
Theodore J. Lowi, The End of Liberalism, 40th Anniversary Edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009).
Richard L. Hall and Alan V. Deardorff, “Lobbying as Legislative Subsidy,” The American Political Science Review 100, no. 1 (Feb. 2006): 69–84.
The notion that campaign contributions are likely to have the greatest impact when Congress is dealing with concentrated benefits and members of Congress are undecided has been confirmed by many studies. See, for example, R. Smith, “Interest Group Influence in the U.S. Congress,” Legislative Studies Journal 20 (1995): 89–139;
and for an overview, see R. Morton and C. Cameraon, “Elections and the Theory of Campaign Contributions: A Survey and Critical Analysis,” Economics and Politics 4 (1992): 79–108.
See Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, Winner Take All Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010).
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© 2013 Marc Stier
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Stier, M. (2013). Why We Organize. In: Grassroots Advocacy and Health Care Reform. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137341976_2
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