Virginia Gray, David Lowery, and Jennifer K. Benz take a rather unique approach to examining the development of health policy in the United States. Building on their own substantial previous work on the role of interest groups in state-level policy making, and adding to it material from numerous reliable national sources, they construct an overview of lessons learned from the states in the past few decades and their impact on the future of national health policy. An innovation theory framework shapes the book, in particular using their energy-stability-area (ESA) model to examine interest group activities across a range of health policy situations. Starting from three categories of recent key state health policy reform efforts and their evolution, the authors build a thorough description of the likely pressures and strengths underlying the states' responses to the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
Throughout, they emphasize the “heterogeneity of the results” (160) and the...
