A question for those who remember the Social Security Act of 1965,

[alsame]

Do you remember partisan fighting about Medicare and Medicaid? Was it covered in the media?

Was it as ugly as this health care fight? Did the GOP use scare tactics?

Were Republicans united in their opposition?

I've seen some old ads and read about the legislative process, but I'm curious about your personal memories about how much opposition LBJ faced.

[Hepburn]

1. Yes, I recall it...

...but not that well. I was in HS at the time. I can recall the BS about the evils of socialized medicine ~~ and being a bit of a radical back then as now, it seemed to me (as it still does) that socialized medicine is a very good thing. I could not figure out for the life of me what in the hell problem anyone had with the sick and injured getting medical care and the government seeing to it. I was only 16 - 17 years old when this was going on...but I do recall being puzzled by the bullshit about it.

:hi:

Edit for typo.

[alsame]

2. That's what I thought. I've seen the Reagan ad about how

evil Medicare would be and assumed there was a lot of bs being thrown around then as now.

I was a young child but I remember that my grandparents were just thrilled about it passing.

Thanks for your feedback.

:hi:

[Eric J in MN]

3. The movie "Sicko" mentions the Reagan vinyl record against socialized medicine.

(The Michael Moore movie. I bought it on DVD. Worth buying.)

[alsame]

6. Yep, I've heard that record. I guess the fact that he was

dead wrong about Medicare didn't stop people from voting for him years later.

[customerserviceguy]

4. I was a kid

but I used to read a lot, and I do remember the term socialized medicine coming up a lot in the discussion of Medicare.

Here's an excerpt from Time Magazine in July 1965, describing the mood at an AMA convention:

"There was no doubt that the delegates, almost to a man, were against medicare. The official position was that Government financing of health care for the aged will bring Government control, and with this will come deterioration in the quality of care. Therefore A.M.A. must oppose it. But how? No fewer than nine resolutions were in the hopper when the delegates convened, all urging that doctors boycott medicare if the Administration's bill is enacted."

I go to the Time magazine archives a lot, they are a valuable source of highly searchable information. Some of it almost seems quaint, here's an excerpt from an April 1965 article entitled "What Medicare Will Do" :

"The burden of the $3-a-month premiums would be eased considerably by a basic 7% increase in old-age pension checks, retroactive to last January. The maximum monthly social security payment of $127 would immediately rise to $135.90, but everyone would get at least $4 more a month to spend."

The entire cost for the first year was expected to be $6 billion, $5 billion from premiums and payroll taxes, the remaining one billion from general revenues. Of course, it's expected to be about $420 billion in fiscal year 2009. From that, I have no illusions about cost savings, but I would surmise that elderly people have far better healthcare available to them now than they did before Medicare. To me, that's the real goal of health care reform.

[alsame]

7. Interesting, thank you. I see the GOP today is using the

same buzzwords as the AMA did then - gov't control, deterioration in quality of care.

I agree, Medicare has been a successful program in terms of the quality afforded to seniors.

[ipaint]

5. Some info here

From NHI to Medicare
Truman’s experience was no less frustrating. In the election battle of 1948 he made national health insurance prominent among his proposals for a Fair Deal. But he faced a barrage of ideological criticism that linked national health insurance with socialism, communism, and the Soviet Union. After some years of facing certain defeat in the Congress, Truman turned his advisers in 1951 to a more modest goal: a health insurance program for Social Security recipients that would in time become the Medicare program of 1965.

During Truman’s presidency, according to the polls, the general public supported government health insurance. But this support was neither deep nor informed. The label of “socialized medicine” scared many, enough so that no amount of presidential enthusiasm could generate majority support in Congress. What we later came to know as the conservative coalition linked opposition from powerful Southern Democrats and their ideological counterparts among Republicans. This was enough to defeat every attempt at universal coverage—whether for all Americans or just the over-sixty-fives—until 1965.

The fight over Medicare illustrates the rarely achieved conditions sufficient for successful (if partial) reform. Before 1965, the conservative coalition was formidable. The Democratic landslide of 1964 swept away the key conservative bases of institutional power: dilatory tactics by the Rules Committee, control of other key committees, and a Congress as a whole less liberal than John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson. The massive electoral shift of 1964 held a lesson for future reformers: a fully sufficient condition for reform was a two-to-one Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, a margin large enough to contain within it a (smaller) majority on Medicare. In retrospect, Medicare might well have emerged a bit later in any case, given its narrow defeats in the early 1960s; the 1964 victory makes it impossible to know for sure whether and how long such a counterfactual development might have taken.

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/?article=863

The author is this Theodore Marmor

http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Medicare-Social-Institutions-Change/dp/product-description/0202304256

[alsame]

8. It's amazing how those paragraphs describe a

situation similar to today. The GOP and conservative Democrat playbook hasn't changed much.

Thanks for this source, it was a very good read.

[ipaint]

9. This is also an excellent must read on the current legislation by the

same author.

Health Reform: The Fateful Moment

By Theodore R. Marmor, Jonathan Oberlander

"...What kind of legislation can we realistically expect to be enacted in 2009? House Democrats have a good chance, as noted above, of winning passage for the Tri-Committee Bill. With Al Franken finally in the Senate, Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority that could pass health reform without any Republican votes (though that assumes all conservative Democrats would back a reform that does not have bipartisan support). As mentioned, the Senate could also use reconciliation rules, which require only a simple majority, to pass health care legislation. However, some Democratic senators are reluctant to invoke reconciliation rules for both political and technical reasons. Max Baucus, for his part, has insisted upon enacting reform on a bipartisan basis. Furthermore, the reconciliation process risks producing legislative "Swiss cheese," since the Senate parliamentarian has the authority to exclude any provision he regards as irrelevant.<16>

If both houses of Congress pass health reform legislation, a conference committee will struggle with reconciling divergent bills and conflicting political coalitions. The political dilemma is that abandoning a strong public plan—in order to win votes from centrist Democrats and moderate Republicans in the Senate—will alienate liberal Democrats in the House, who threaten to withhold support if such a plan is not included.

President Obama's involvement in this political endgame will be crucial. The most important unanswered question in health reform is how much influence the President will exert on the conference committee. Will Obama successfully pressure Senate conferees to accept a more liberal reform—including a robust public plan—than they prefer? Or will he accept a more conservative bill in order to take credit for a political victory?<17>

Whatever health reform legislation emerges this fall (if any), we can plausibly predict that it will substantially reduce the number of uninsured Americans. That in itself would be a major achievement, though it will surely fall short of universal coverage. Moreover, unless it provides system-wide limits on health care spending, any legislation that emerges from Congress will not reliably control the costs of medical care. These two issues are closely linked. Failure to control costs would jeopardize the very gains in health insurance coverage that reform promises."

—July 16, 2009

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22931

[alsame]

10. Thank you!

[Yupster]

11. This is an interesting article

about the beginning of medicare in 1965.

It's a long read, but interesting, and it's from 1993.

I don't know anything about "Reason Magaizine."

http://www.reason.com/news/show/29339.html

[alsame]

12. I think "Reason" is libertarian. I have bookmarked this

article and will read it later. Thanks.

[ipaint]

13. I believe that is written by Steven Hayward of AEI

http://www.aei.org/scholar/28

All it took was google search...easy.

[Hannah Bell]

14. it's a crock of lying libertarian shit, sorry.