Medicare (serving elderly SS recipients) is social insurance. Medicaid (children and indigent elderly) is not. The simplest move is to make Medicare universal. If you move most of the non-elderly population into the program, the accompaniment by non-contributors is less noticable. Medical care for the poor is less controversial to begin with, which helps to explain the major expansion of medicaid spending over the past 20 years, our conservative politics notwithstanding.
> Maybe wrap a few programs into one: college grants, AFDC,
etc. A citizen makes some contributions to the program and then she or her
children can draw from it?>>
Some folks in D.C. are working on a social insurance version of child care. Wrap too many things together, however, and you lose the thematic focus underlying political support for the reform.
> Unemployment compensation and workmen's comp already fit the
definition of social insurance, I suppose-- which brings up a couple
examples of social insurance programs that have been nibbled at by the
right.>>
Right, though this goes back and forth. When unemployment is high, the Repubs have had great difficulty resisting Dem demands for incremental expansion of the program (e.g., extensions of benefits).
MBS