ABSTRACT
The principal aim of the longitudinal perspective is to make more explicit some of the major potentials and constraints on health reform that derive from the nature of our democratic institutions, the operations of our economy, and our tolerance for inequities between ethnic groups and social classes. The average citizen had no direct and ongoing experience with the workings of the Supreme Court and even less with the embryonic League of Nations. So far the clarifications that have been at the center of our concern about achieving the goals of health reform relate primarily to the institutional framework which bounds the current US health care system. Such advocacy by many of the nation's leading corporations for greater federal initiative was, to say the least, a striking departure from their conventional policy position. Universal coverage is only one half of the President's priority goals for reform; the other half relates to the institution of effective cost controls.
