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
Many seniors don't realize they can sell their life insurance policy instead of letting it lapse. Here's how life settlements work and when they make sense.
Yesterday you learned the three tax buckets. Today, the playbook. Three specific strategies sophisticated planners run with permanent life insurance, including one that can defuse the tax bill your kids would otherwise inherit along with your IRA. Part five of The Evolution of a Promise.