Medicare at 50: Looking back, and looking forward
Greg Sargent
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2015/07/31/medicare-at-50-looking-back-and-looking-forward/
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I wanted to focus on another lesson that can be drawn from Medicare’s history. It’s a reminder of how long it takes to secure true progressive reform, and how hard it is to continue to build on such change. This should be kept in mind by those who are, understandably, frustrated by the opposition that continues to bedevil Obamacare’s coverage expansion, and by the many other ways in which progressive change has been stymied during the Obama years.
Medicare is taken for granted as a pillar of American life today. But it was only achieved more than 15 years after the push for government health care got underway, when President Harry Truman called for national health insurance in 1949. Medicare became law a full eight years after Congressional Democrats decided, in 1957, to try to secure a much narrower plan — one only for the elderly — than Truman wanted. In a sense, Medicare itself represented a scale-back of liberal ambitions.
Medicare was difficult to achieve, even though the American public was less ideologically divided over the proposal than it has been over, say, the Affordable Care Act. According to Julian Zelizer’s wonderful book on the Congressional battles over the Great Society, polling in the mid-1960s showed that a majority of Americans favored government-funded health care for the elderly over a privately-financed program.
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Progressive change is hard. It proceeds in fits and starts, with long periods of stagnation intervening and major setbacks stalling or even reversing gains. Be patient, folks.
