Few are happy with it, politicians on the right and left criticize it, but the fact remains that the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003 ushered in the greatest expansion of Medicare coverage in the program's history. Its lukewarm support, combined with its dramatic impact, make the act a fascinating subject for anyone interested in the politics of modern health care. Kimberly J. Morgan, Ph.D. and Andrea L. Campbell, Ph.D., seek to understand why the Bush administration crafted and backed such a hotly debated and expensive piece of legislation and whether there will be political consequences from its passage. Their project, The Medicare Modernization Act of 2003: Ideologies, Interests, and Policy Feedbacks in the Contemporary Politics of Medicare, focuses on how the drive to inject market forces into federal entitlements produced such a dramatic expansion of the Medicare program and how ideology, special interests, and public opinion shaped the law. The investigators analyze the law's effect on voting, special interests, public opinion, and access to Medicare.

Andrea Louise Campbell is the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science at MIT. She is the author of How Policies Make Citizens: Senior Political Activism and the American Welfare State (Princeton University Press, 2003), and articles in the American Political Science Review, Political Behavior, Studies in American Political Development, and Comparative Political Studies. She studies American politics, political behavior, public opinion, political inequality, and social policy. In 2001-3, she was an RWJ Scholar in Health Policy Research at Yale University. In addition to the Investigator Award project, she is writing a new book on taxes, public opinion, and the American fiscal state. She is the recipient of the 2006 Emerging Scholar Award of the Political Organization and Parties section of the American Political Science Association.