![]() ![]() "And then Congress said, 'Not invented here? Throw it away,' and then started over again." "It was written at the White House and then presented to Congress almost as a fait accompli," said Gergen. ![]() "This health care system is badly broken and it's time to fix it," President Clinton told Congress in September 1993.įirst lady Hillary Clinton presided over the closed-door drafting of legislation. Indeed, with the 1992 election of Bill Clinton, reform was back at the top of the agenda. But the Nixon plan is one Democrats would embrace," said Morone. "And health care reform was dead once again. And, at the last minute, in spring of 1973, as Nixon is going down, the Republicans in Congress balked. It was the most creative new national health insurance bill maybe in the entire story. "He came up with the great national health insurance proposal: We're going to leave employers in place, we're going to leave Medicare and Medicaid, and we'll just try to cover everybody else using competitive mechanisms. "Throughout his career he had a soft spot for health care he was a liberal on health care," said Morone said. His successor - Republican Richard Nixon - wanted to extend coverage to everyone else. With his Medicare and Medicaid legislation, LBJ brought a form of universal health care to the elderly and the poor. And when you got the Johnson treatment you just wanted to get out there and take a breath of air." "The Johnson treatment of how he would grab a Congressman, and he'd pluck their jacket, and he'd put his arm around him - and he's a big man, 250 pounds. "Johnson knew how to play Congress like perhaps no other president in history," Morone said. President Lyndon Johnson, formerly known as 'the Master of the Senate' - had the political muscle to break the logjam. ![]() Not until the 1960s would a savvy veteran of Congress finally make some headway. "And, after that, they didn't even take a vote." So many groups lined up to scream against 'socialized medicine' that they extended the hearing two more weeks. They had hearings, four weeks of hearings. "Truman believed in his bones, in his guts, that national health insurance was the most important thing for America," Morone said. Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman, learned that lesson the hard way. "We've organized Congress in a way to make it very, very difficult." "Why don't we have it? One word: Congress," said Morone. But even after getting Social Security approved by his own divided Congress, FDR found that universal health care was simply a "bill" too far. The idea was revived two decades later by yet another Roosevelt, Franklin. Theodore Roosevelt made the opening salvo: He campaigned on healthcare-for-all in his 1912 attempt to return to office. And they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams," said Brown University professor James Morone, who has chronicled the attempts of presidents past to make national health care a reality. "The founding fathers didn't want to make it easy. Īnd if it feels like this long, angry and divisive debate over American health care has gone on practically forever - the fact is, it has. Over the past week, hold-out Democrats were whipped into ine.Īnd on Thursday, the Congressional Budget Office gave a badly-needed boost to the bill, estimating its cost as "on-target" at $940 billion - even predicting a deficit reduction of more than $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years.īut opponents aren't going down without a fight. If he wins, he will definitely get a place in the history books. ![]() "If he fails, it will, it could be almost catastrophic for his presidency. "Barack Obama's presidency is on the line with this vote,' said David Gergen, a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School and CNN's senior political analyst. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |