How did we ever get Medicare? Any DUers know of a definitive book on it?

[CTyankee]

I am heading to my library today and will also check out a good LBJ bio. Even though I was a adult at the time of Medicare and Medicaid's establishment, I don't remember the political back story. I do remember Republicans having a fit and then...nothing much.

Obviously, Medicare/Medicaid left the insurance companies alone, so in essence we got a halfway measure. The elderly were "universally" covered, the poor not so much and the rest of us left to fight for ourselves.

[TechBear_Seattle]

1. According to Wikipedia...

Medicare is the name given to a health insurance program administered by the United States government, covering people who are either age 65 and over, or who meet other special criteria. It was originally signed into law on 1965-07-30 by President Lyndon B. Johnson as amendments to Social Security legislation. At the bill-signing ceremony President Johnson enrolled former President Harry S. Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary and presented him with the first Medicare card.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_%28United_States%29

That is about it for history, though.

[CTyankee]

2. I wonder about the political battle itself. Here is my "guess".

It was a very popular idea, not only with seniors, but also with their adult children who often had a huge financial burden as their parents got older and needed more medical care. Since it was an extension of Social Security, it wasn't an "alien" idea: people had grown to trust and love SS.

This made it easier for Democrats in Congress to enact it.

[SharonAnn]

4. Actually, conservative Democrats opposed it and liberal/moderate Republicans supported it.

I remember the battle during the early 1960's over the original King-Anderson bill and the Kerr-Mills bill. I wrote papers on them for my high school civics class.

As the daughter of an MD, I was taught that these were "Socialized Medicine" and that the country would disintegrate if we ever enacted such communistic programs. I was told that there were plenty of charitable programs for seniors who couldn't afford medical care (hospital care was the cost-driver back then) and doctors would waive their fees. Maybe there were such programs back then and doctors would waive their fees back then, but there's not much of that now.

I'm embarrassed to say that I wrote against the bills back then, but then I believed my parents and the other conservative Republicans. Now I know better. Always find out "who benefits" from a proposed legislative or tax policy. Then find out "who suffers" from it. Then look for further information.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

8. I remember an ad in which some older woman was saying that Medicare

was unnecessary because she'd gotten help with her medical bills through the Kerr-Mills Law, whatever that was.

But I was a young teenager then, so the struggles of seniors didn't occupy a lot of space in my mind.

[The2ndWheel]

3. Cheap energy, more people working, and youth

Cheap energy allowed more things to be done quicker, more people being paid for work and not being slaves, and the baby boom.

[OHdem10]

5. I thought one of the remarkable lines used over the years

Not a single Republican voted for it. This is why they are
not credible to deal with it.

[nealmhughes]

6. Go to www.worldcat.org, search medicare-history.

The main hit I get is Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby: The Genesis of Medicare. Monte M. Poen (Columbia: U. of Missouri, 1979).

Worldcat is a utility librarians use to find texts and this is the "lite" version as it will not give you a truly world wide view, but will find the books/articles/journals you have in a given area. The "real" one is a subscription service that large public libraries and academic libraries have. Another great service out of Dublin Ohio for the geeky community.

Now turn that cell phone on vibrate before I have to ssssh your butt!

[CTyankee]

7. Thank you, I will!

It's just amazing to me that more popular books haven't been written on how we got Medicare, if for no other reason than as a "how to" guide in getting Medicare for everyone.

[nealmhughes]

9. I would venture to guess that noone is willing to subsidize the costs of research.

It would be a major undertaking and most authors who are looking for a wide audience to make money just don't have the money to undertake the years of research it would take. I would bet that the book I found started out as a Ph.D. dissertation, which means that the grad school did a lot of the research subsidy for the research.

The basic research could be undertaken at any academic library with a great Gov Docs section or a very large public library, but for the papers of the major players back in the day it would take many trips to the archives for each for the pros and cons that the politicians wrote and spoke.

Travel costs to and from an archive are the main inhibiter for many scholars -- myself included to a great extent -- and those who are living on a small budget or have work schedules that make a lot travel impossilbe are just stuck with what we can get locally or remotely.

I will sign into the academic databases and see what I can send you besides the one book. I didn't have access handy this morning.

Neal Hughes,

The "other kind of librarian"

[CTyankee]

15. But how timely would it be! Especially if we get a DEm in the White House in 08!

We might have a blueprint to Medicare, so to speak. It might be an attractive book deal for some enterprising author to pitch to a publisher.

Are you interested?

[ProudDad]

19. Defeat most republicans and all conservative Dems (n/t)

[Lucinda]

12. Thanks for psoting the link!

:)

[ProudDad]

18. It's my understanding that Truman

wanted Single-Payer...

Yet another reason he "had to go" according to the corporate capitalist masters...

[sandnsea]

10. The Depression

Nothing like starvation caused by the rich to wake people up.

[illinoisprogressive]

11. How did we get medicare? FDR

[madfloridian]

13. Just be very thankful we have it.

Unless you guys want to pay the medical and hospital bills of your parents after the retire. Most companies do not offer insurance after retirement.

Talk is cheap when the conservatives speak out against it. Wait till they have to pay medical bills for their parents or see them suffer.

[CTyankee]

14. Good point. Lots of Republicans at that time must have said to themselves that Medicare is OK.

Nowadays Republicans are so rich they couldn't care less about the rest of Americans. My father was not in favor of Medicare in the 60s and my mother, a strong Democrat, gave him a hard time when he went on Medicare at age 65. That was kind of funny!

I love it when all these Republicans with their GI Bill of Rights, VA loans, SS, and Medicare start bitching about the "nanny state." I like to remind them, whenever I can do so "nicely," that only Democrats brought them those benefits in their lives. I don't think they appreciate hearing that!

[madfloridian]

16. Just one illness of one parent could break a family financially

People never think about those things. Before Medicare, average older people had no way to get insurance. You had to be rich to afford it at that age.

They are about to destroy it right now. The drug bill is just the first step to turning it all over to private companies with no oversight.

Many elderly people got good medical care for the first time in their lives in 1965.

It has been a real blessing.

No, you are wrong on one thing. Many Republicans here are not rich, they just vote that way because they are fundamentalists. One illness could wipe them out.

[CTyankee]

20. Yes, you are right, but they don't appear to care.

My BIL is a case in point. He is 80 and has had diabetes for many years, altho he has kept himself in good physical shape otherwise. He is a big Republican in the midwest. But he is not rich (not poor either, just not rich). If I had the nerve to start a family fight, I would ask him about his dependence on government programs:

1) Social Security, which he's been on for 15 years now;

2) Medicare, ditto;

3) GI Bill. After WWII, in which he barely served, he was allowed to have the requirement of a Bachelor's degree waived and was admitted to law school. As a son of a poor family, the only way he could attend law school was the GI Bill.

Thus, in these 3 critical areas of life, this man has been served by the Democratic Party, and yet he is a lifelong Republican.

[ProudDad]

17. After the Johnson landslide of '64

There was a little tiny window of opportunity for good legislation...between the landslide, the congresscritters who owed Johnson and the congresscritters upon whom Lyndon Johnson had the goods, it was passed.

It was sold as an "old age" program like Social Security.

It IS A SINGLE-PAYER system...just like HR676.

It's been damn successful in spite of the Herculean efforts of right-wingers and "conservatives" to kill it by starving it to death...they're still trying...that new MC part "D" was carefully crafted by the pukes as an additional attempt to discredit Medicare

and most of the folks who are on it would hang you from the tallest tree if you tried to take it away. My aged Republican Mother would for SURE...

There was also still a vestige of the Depression era and New Deal philosophy that "WE" are important and inter-dependent as a society

I have less confidence that it would pass now in the "ME" society...

[antigop]

21. Brief history of Medicare

http://seniorjournal.com/NEWS/2000%20Files/Aug%2000/FTR-08-04-00MedCarHistry.htm

[antigop]

22. Great link at ssa.gov -- THE EVOLUTION OF MEDICARE

http://www.ssa.gov/history/corning.html

[antigop]

23. PBS: The Medicare System ---- history

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/medicare/tph.html

[antigop]

24. Medicare Legislative History -- includes vote tallies

http://www.ssa.gov/history/tally65.html

[WeCanWorkItOut]

25. Starr also covers LBJ's big Medicare mistakes--lest we forget

For general background, there's Paul Starr's 1982 book, The Social Transformation of American Medicine. He gives a few pages specifically to the Kennedy/Johnson story.

Starr also covers the problem of Johnson giving away too much the medical lobby, a major issue circa 1980, when there was still a lot of inflation, partly, of course related to Vietnam, partly to oil issues, but partly to health care (all of which painful stuff you no doubt recall!).

So on page 378 (of my paperback edition), Starr concludes: "An administration more concerned with the budgetary consequences of concessions . . . would not have yielded so much. The government and liberal reformers would pay a price for this choice later on."

And so, fellow liberal reformers, let's be careful. Times are getting tougher.

[Justitia]

26. Interesting note: largest expansion of Medicare was done by Nixon, of all people

He did it right before the election (literally weeks), and for purely political reasons, but what he did greatly expanded Medicare more than he ever dreamed it would.

He expanded Medicare coverage to include people of any age with End Stage Renal Disease (kidney failure requiring dialysis) and a few other exceptions. There were some very dedicated, good people (doctors, researchers and politicians) who had been fighting for years to get this covered via the federal government. Their dedicated fight, combined w/Nixon's political ambition, got it done that year.

I know all this because my son has Medicare, he has total renal failure, and lives on dialysis while waiting for a kidney transplant. If not for Medicare (God Bless LBJ) and it's expansion (yes, God Bless Nixon for whatever his motivation), my 24 yr old son would be dead.

The republicans who voted for the expansion (to bolster Nixon) said afterward they never would have voted for it if they knew how radically it would expand following that vote. Assholes.