What Is the “American Contradiction”?

What Is the “American Contradiction”?

I first met Paul Starr in the summer of 1978 when I was working as a college intern in the speechwriting office of Jimmy Carter’s White House. I remember thinking how smart he was, and sure enough, a few years later in 1984, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Social Transformation of American Medicine. That book is so important that you cannot understand the history of medicine in the United States without it. He did something similar with The Cr…