Politics, Policy, and Public Options

A public option is a government-provided social good that exists alongside a similar privately provided good. While the public option is typically identified with health care policy, public options have been a long-standing feature of American life in a variety of sectors, ranging from libraries to swimming pools. Public schools, for example, coexist alongside private schools. However, there is surprisingly little research on “public options” as a general category. Rather, over the last few decades, considerable scholarly and popular efforts to ensure access to important social goods have focused on market subsidies (like vouchers) or privatization – which both face increasing criticism. Uniting scholars from across disciplines, this volume delves into the theory of the public option, explores several important case studies, and shows how public options could be a corrective to the trend toward privatization and subsidies. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Ganesh Sitaraman is Professor of Law and Director of the Program on Law and Government at Vanderbilt Law School. He is the author or coauthor of four books, including The Great Democracy and The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution, a New York Times Notable Book of 2017.

Anne Alstott is the Jacquin D. Bierman Professor at the Yale Law School. Professor Alstott is the author of a number of books, including A New Deal for Old Age (2016) and Taxation in Six Concepts (2015). Her articles on social welfare policy, including tax policy, have been widely published in leading law journals, including the Harvard Law Review, the Yale Law Journal, and the Columbia Law Review. She has written or co-written pieces for The New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Huffington Post, and Slate and has appeared on NPR.