Back Issues & Abstracts

Book Review: 

David Zarefsky reviewing Robert Stevens’s & Rosemary Stevens’s Welfare Medicine in America:  A Case Study of Medicaid, by Robert Stevens & Rosemary Stevens, 53 Texas L. Rev. 636 (1975).

Welfare Medicine in America is a history of Medicaid.  Professor Zarefsky notes that Stevens and Stevens appear to recognize the deliberate creation of ambiguity was instrumental in passing Medicaid laws, however they overlook the rhetorical significance of this ambiguity when they identify “the need of clarity of goals at the outset of a social program.”  Ultimately, Welfare Medicine in America “is a call for makers of social policy to give increased attention to the primary function of rhetoric—the mutual adjustment ‘of ideas to people and of people to ideas.’”