American Health Care Blues

Book excerpt: Making novel use of the sociology of organizations and pragmatic philosophy, Irwin Miller sheds new light on the nature and evolution of both the Blues and American health care voluntarism and reform. He shows how Walter McNerney, one of the primary health policy shapers over the past forty years, used ideological and utopian rhetoric to help move Blue Cross into HMO development. This case study of institutional and leadership behavior uses firsthand interviews, archival documents, oral histories, and other materials to present an unusually concrete and readable narrative account as to how health care leaders engage in creative institution building, or health care reform.