All week we followed a promise that took fifty-three years to win. Today, the two things about it that matter most to your family: a one-time enrollment window that does not repeat, and the one expense Medicare has never covered. That gap is doing to families today exactly what hospital bills did in
In the spring of 1966, roughly seven hundred federal workers fanned out across the country to inspect two thousand hospitals in three months. They were not checking the medicine. They were checking whether Black patients were admitted, because no hospital that discriminated could take Medicare money
On July 30, 1965, Lyndon Johnson did not sign Medicare in Washington. He flew to Independence, Missouri, walked into the Truman Library, and signed it in front of the man who had lost this fight twenty years earlier. Then he handed Harry Truman the first Medicare card ever issued. Bess got the secon
By 1965 there were three rival health bills in Congress, and two of them existed to make sure Medicare never happened. The chairman who had strangled the idea for a decade looked at all three, said maybe we should put them together, and told a staffer to have it drafted by morning. That is why your
In 1961, the campaign to stop Medicare did not run on television. It arrived in the mail as a vinyl record, addressed to doctors' wives, with instructions to invite the neighbors over for coffee and play it. The man speaking on that record later became president. Twenty-seven years later he signed t
In 1912, a former president put health insurance for the old and the sick on a national ballot. It did not become law until 1965. In between sits one of the longest arguments in American history, and a single phrase that kept winning it. Harry Truman saw the phrase coming and tried to disarm it in a