Trusted Writing on History, Travel, and American Culture Since 1949
Medicare
Employing shrewd politics and a strong dose of compromise, LBJ passes comprehensive federal insurance for seniors.
In 1965, after winning in a landslide against Barry Goldwater and helping to carry Democratic supermajorities into both houses of Congress, President Lyndon Johnson set out to enact a battery of Great Society reforms, including Medicare, government insurance for seniors. Despite his political mandate, 60 years of conservative opposition to such a measure meant proceeding with caution. Later, California Governor Ronald Reagan, for example, would characterize the Medicare bill as the advance wave of a socialism that would “invade every area of freedom in this country.” Reagan predicted that this reform would compel Americans to spend their “sunset years telling our children and our grandchildren what it was like in America when men were free.”
The arguments raging in the current health-care debate have all been heard before.
Whenever the debate now in progress about a national health-care bill heats up, I remind myself of how lucky I am as a senior citizen (a euphemism that, like the flabby word elderly , I dislike) to have the issue at least partly settled in my cas
As modern medicine has grown ever more powerful, our ways of providing it and paying for it have gotten ever-more-wasteful, unaffordable, and unfair. Here is an explanation and a possible first step toward a solution.
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about modern medicine is just how very, very modern it is. Ninety percent of the medicine being practiced today did not exist in 1950.
Americans have never been so healthy, thanks to advances in medical technology and research. Now we have to learn to deal with the staggering costs.
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