ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses both some representative analytic models and the use put to them in the bulk of the Medicare analysis. It compares the political processes and policy outcomes of Medicare with those of other issues to show how the processes that characterized the Medicare dispute are general to the redistributive arena of American politics. The chapter addresses itself to some of the differences between legislative and administrative politics. The bureaucratic politics framework considers "domestic policy" to consist of outcomes of a series of overlapping "bargaining games" arranged hierarchically within the national government. Political scientists have expended great efforts in recent years trying to specify the ways by which different issues are raised, disputed, coped with, and sometimes "solved." Lawrence Friedman suggests that the effort to elicit wide support for programs that avoid the connotations of "welfare" almost inevitably, in American politics, produce middle-class legislative models.
