Since Past Daily got started it’s been an almost regular feature of ours to run some historic perspective on the issue of Health Insurance in America.
We’ve been comparing Healthcare in America versus other parts of the world. Looking at the issue of National Healthcare throughout history; how a system of government subsidized health insurance was an issue going back to the days just after the Civil War. How some form of a health insurance has been introduced on Capitol Hill since roughly the 1890’s when President Teddy Roosevelt proposed it around the same time as Roosevelt proposed sweeping laws protecting child labor, the health of our food and the preservation of our natural resources. How it became an idea whose time had come during the FDR years. How a plan for a National Health Insurance would be introduced around the same time as Social Security and other sweeping changes to our welfare as a result of the Great Depression. How it was introduced again just prior to our entry into World War 2 and postponed for the War effort. How, after the death of FDR, President Truman took up the issue in an attempt to continue the legacy of his predecessor, only this time it was met with heavy resistance from the Insurance Sector as well as some Doctors who were falling in line with what was to become Big Pharma.
How Big Pharma was becoming a potent force in the lobbying and influence of legislators to maintain the status quo. And how President Kennedy was determined to introduce legislation for a comprehensive Government Sponsored healthcare plan before the 1964 election only to have that idea shelved with Kennedy’s assassination.
Having it again picked up by Lyndon Johnson and brought up in one form or another by every President since.
So the idea of a National Health insurance is no recent idea – it came close when a boiler-plate version of a National Health Care plan was introduced during the Obama administration and managed to succeed into law, only to be widely criticized and labeled “Obama Care” by a well orchestrated backlash from the Insurance Industry. Since then, it has been dismantled and tossed out, unaware (or unwilling) that it was a stepping off point, where amendments were to be introduced as time went on, but that the basic concept was finally law.
Well, all that.
But in 1946, right around the time President Truman was trying to introduce the concept of Compulsory Health Insurance which had initially been suggested by FDR, the subject was up for fierce debate – the health insurance Industry was growing up and becoming a potent force on Capitol Hill.
This program, an episode of Wake Up, America featured two legislators – Senator Claude Pepper and Senator Robert Taft to debate the issue.
It gets lively but it signifies the issue that some sort of National Health Insurance was becoming further and further away from reality as it was increasingly becoming a political issue, rather than a human necessity.
