By Bernard Avishai, The Nation, Feb. 13, 2012 issue

(Book review of Remedy and Reation: The Peculiar American Struggle Over Health Care Reform, by Paul Starr.)

It is hard to read Remedy and Reaction, Paul Starr’s remarkable chronicle of the hundred-year effort to legislate universal health insurance in the United States, without recalling Robert Gibbs’s tortured quip that Democrats who’ve denounced the Obama White House for having knuckled under to Republican principles or intimidation “ought to be drug-tested.” Nobody with a sense of history—that is, nobody who reads Starr’s book—could doubt how sensible and brave was the president’s effort to drive the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 through Congress. Nobody with a feel for the present moment should doubt how imminent is the threat to the act, how urgent it is for progressive Democrats to rally around Obama—and without all the condescending qualifications that “independents,” who flock away from allegedly weak or incompetent leaders, interpret as contempt [....]

For comparison, an earlier review:

By Timothy Noah in the New York Times' Sunday Book Review, Nov. 20, 2011:

[....] Paul Starr’s compact but thorough “Remedy and Reaction” is an unofficial companion volume to his Pulitzer Prizewinning 1982 book, “The Social Transformation of American Medicine.” The new book would be livelier if it didn’t confine itself to policy. But Starr is a sociologist, not a historian or journalist (though he moonlights as a co-editor of The American Prospect, a respected liberal monthly). His long, wonky trail begins in the Progressive Era [....]