What if the Goal Isn't Health Care Reform... - Columns - American Issues Project

What if the Goal Isn't Health Care Reform... - Columns - American Issues Project: "Are you familiar with the names Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven? Not to many American are, but more and more authors are finding their theories, actions and especially their results very relevant to today's push for more and more government programs, specifically health care reform.

Richard Andrew Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were both sociologists. In the May 2, 1966 issue of The Nation they published an article titled 'The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty.' In the article, Cloward and Piven posited that welfare was a tool the rich used to keep the poor in check. Rather than helping the poor to meet their daily needs, it kept them placated and therefore they did not revolt. They pointed out that many people who were eligible welfare but were not using it and proposed a strategy to use this fact to end poverty across the nation.

They suggested that if the programs were flooded with those who were not using them, it

“would produce bureaucratic disruption in welfare agencies and fiscal disruption in local and state governments” that would “deepen existing divisions among elements in the big-city Democratic coalition: the remaining white middle class, the white working-class ethnic groups and"