but, no, Ted Kennedy didn't murder healthcare. Carter, a moderate, wanted a "low cost free market" solution to healthcare -- a plan weaker than Obamacare. Kennedy, a strong liberal, wanted a single payer compulsory program. But Carter's lackluster performance in his single term allowed Reagan to get elected and we ended up with nothing.
And now, in 2017, Carter finally supports Kennedy-style healthcare reform. (See the second article below)
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/131473
by Timothy Stanley
Timothy Stanley is Leverhulme Research Fellow, Royal Holloway College, University of London, and author of Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul (Kansas, 2010).
In an interview on CBS that aired on Sunday, President Jimmy Carter claimed that Senator Edward Kennedy deprived the nation of comprehensive healthcare by sabotaging a bill his administration floated in 1978. The charge is nothing new—Carter made it in his memoirs Keeping Faith thirty years ago. It has contemporary relevance, though, because Carter implies that U.S. liberals are their own worst enemy. Kennedy was driven, he said, by a mix of issue militancy and spite: the senator “did not want to see me have a major success in that realm of life.” Had Ted Kennedy been less petty and more practical, concludes Carter, we could have comprehensive healthcare by now. The lesson for latter-day liberals: shut up and get behind President Obama’s healthcare proposals.
But the story of the failure of the 1978 bill is more complex than that. Carter should take some of the blame for floating an anemic piece of legislation that, arguably, would have done more harm than good to the cause of healthcare reform. Kennedy’s opposition was principled and rational, and he wasn’t just speaking for himself. One interesting difference between then and now is that in the 1970s, the demand for healthcare reform was tied to a genuine mass movement. Kennedy was just its figurehead and Carter overestimates the senator’s influence. Liberalism had more political clout back then, and liberals had enough confidence in their ideas to think they would outlive Carter’s moderate administration. They were wrong, but their miscalculation was understandable.
Throughout the 1970s, Ted Kennedy campaigned for comprehensive national health insurance (NHI)—a single payer, compulsory system open to all. It was much like the “public option” touted by liberals in 2009-10. Kennedy’s backing was personal: he saw healthcare reform as his contribution to his family’s legacy. Medical treatment was a civil right. Kennedy often pointed out that “We are the only industrialized nation in the world outside [apartheid] South Africa that does not have universal, comprehensive healthcare insurance. And here, as well as in South Africa, black people are sick twice as often; they receive less care; they die younger; and sooner.”
But the NHI proposal did not start or end with Ted Kennedy. The multi-million member Campaign for National Health Insurance (CNHI) was bankrolled by the AFL-CIO and managed by the United Auto Workers union. So convinced was labor of the popularity of reform that they refused to endorse any healthcare package other than NHI. In 1975, Kennedy pulled out of negotiations with Gerald Ford over a compromise bill because the CNHI denounced it. Polls showed that the Democrats would recapture the presidency in 1976, so why, they asked, accept a tepid Republican offer? Wait a year or so and the Democrats could put together their own. The CNHI didn’t count on Jimmy Carter being the nominee.
As a presidential candidate in 1976, Carter equivocated on NHI. In truth, this Southern moderate never liked the idea. A proto-Clinton, he preferred low-cost free-market solutions to public ills. Nonetheless, in order to win over the money and manpower of the UAW, Carter endorsed NHI. After his election, he put Great Society architect Joseph Califano (head of Health Education and Welfare) in charge of drawing up legislation. The UAW met with Califano and was shocked when he told them not to expect the support of the president for reform. He eventually quit his job in frustration at stonewalling by Carter.
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https://www.thenation.com/article/jimmy-carter-calls-for-single-payer/
Jimmy Carter has always been a good man. But he only became a liberal icon during a post-presidency that saw the Democratic Party move steadily right on a host of fundamental issues on which the party once led. Remember that Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy and California Governor Jerry Brown challenged Carter in the 1980 Democratic primaries because they believed that Carter was too cautious on those issues—including health-care reform.
To be clear, even when he served as a moderate Democratic president, Carter was more progressive on many issues than a good number of today’s Democratic “leaders.” The 39th president argued in 1980 for enactment of “an affordable national health plan that will improve Medicare for the elderly, extend protection against catastrophic medical expenses to all of us, improve health coverage for the poor, and provide special benefits to expectant mothers and children in the first years of life.”
But Kennedy and others wanted Carter to go further and faster. Now Carter is there.
Last Sunday, he spoke about the inevitability of a single-payer health-care system. Carter is not some radical change agent but rather a practical political thinker who sees both the logic and the necessity of a “Medicare for All” response to the health-care challenges that America faces today and that Republicans are determined to make dramatically worse in the future.
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