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.

Dr. Morgan's main research interests concern the politics of the welfare state in the U.S. and other advanced industrialized countries. She is the author of Working Mothers and the Welfare State: Religion and the Politics of Work-Family Policies in Western Europe and the United States (Stanford University Press 2006), a comparative study of child care and parental leave policies. With Andrea Louise Campbell, she has studied German and American long-term care policy and the politics of social insurance financing in the U.S., publishing articles on both topics. Her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, Politics and Society, Studies in American Political Development and World Politics.