WHIPLASH: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science: Book Talk with author David Blementhal, MD, MPP

In their new book—the second book they have written together—veteran health and politics experts David Blumenthal and James A. Morone show how three presidential administrations—Obama, Trump, and Biden— revolutionized health care, recast facts as fiction, and profoundly changed America.

Drawing on dozens of interviews with people who served in these three administrations—including an exclusive sit-down with President Barack Obama—the authors show the immense power the President has when it comes to Americans’ health. WHIPLASH: From the Battle for Obamacare to the War on Science links the raucous health care brawls of the past two decades directly to these presidents’ childhoods, families, earlier careers, flaws, strengths, quirks, beliefs, and dreams.

“Ultimately, our narrative turns on a great paradox,” the authors write. “We tell a story of terrific success and terrible failure. Each of these three very different administrations did breakthrough work. The United States came closer than ever to winning a right to health care. It led the world to effective vaccines. It roared out of Covid’s economic crash. But every success brought division. Fundamental human realities—we will all get sick, we will all need the health care system, we will all die—fell into the great antinomies that divide Americans. And they remain there.”

Among the things Blumenthal and Morone write about in WHIPLASH, and/or can discuss:

· The incorrect narrative about scientists’ “failures” during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the facts that set the record straight about how the pandemic was handled during at the beginning, middle, and end;

· What lessons we should take away from that pandemic, and how it was handled politically and scientifically, to prepare for the next one;

· From their exclusive interview with President Obama, his own reflections on and feelings about the quest for—and successful creation of—the Affordable Care Act;

· How Obama’s prediction about the ACA (that once it was in place, it would become impossible to eliminate) has become true, even as Congress is currently debating its subsidies;

· How Trump’s first term brought a once-in-a-lifetime lightning-fast medical breakthrough—the COVID vaccine—due to his management style…but later he had to yield to his base in denying that it would work, robbing Trump of a crowning achievement;

· The irony that decades of quiet, deliberate US government research made possible one of the biggest scientific triumphs in human history–COVID vaccines–to be followed by the Trump Administration’s full-throated attacks on science and its funding. ;

· Biden’s overlooked public health legacy: he put in place the most robust health and poverty safety net programs since the Depression, but eventually couldn’t rally the votes to keep it;

· How the upbringings, life experiences, careers, and family lives of the three leaders profiled in the book affected their health care decisions as President;

· The complicated interconnection of race and class that has played a key role in undermining U.S. public health from the Obama presidency to the second Trump administration;

· Why the sweeping changes being made now to U.S. public health infrastructures and priorities are just the latest symptoms of the political divide in this nation—and they will threaten the health of everyone, no matter for whom you vote.

David Blumenthal, professor of the practice of public health and health policy at Harvard University, is former national coordinator for Health Information Technology, and former president of the Commonwealth Fund. He is the co-author, with James A. Morone, of the 2009 book The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office. From 2009 to 2011 he was National Coordinator for Health Information Technology under President Obama, where he launched the implementation of the HITECH Act which resulted in the adoption of electronic health records by virtually all US physicians and hospitals. Prior to 2009, Dr. Blumenthal was a primary care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Director of the Mongan Institute for Health Policy at MGH and Harvard

James A. Morone is the John Hazen White Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Public Policy, and Urban Studies at Brown University. He is the author of ten previous books, and co-author, with David Blumenthal, of the 2009 book The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office.