If you want to get an idea of how Democrats have been working to reform our healthcare system, hop a link over to the
Truman Library. There, you'll find an entry titled "This Day in Truman History, November 19, 1945: President Truman's Proposed Health Program," which all seems eerily familiar. Only 7 months into Truman's presidency,
he wrote congress asking them to provide healthcare for all citizens. " We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern," he wrote, "that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation."
It didn't go well.
President Truman's health proposals finally came to Congress in the form of a Social Security expansion bill, co-sponsored in Congress by Senators Robert Wagner (D-NY) and James Murray (D-MT), along with Representative John Dingell (D-MI). For this reason, the bill was known popularly as the W-M-D bill. The American Medical Association (AMA) launched a spirited attack against the bill, capitalizing on fears of Communism in the public mind. The AMA characterized the bill as "socialized medicine", and in a forerunner to the rhetoric of the McCarthy era, called Truman White House staffers "followers of the Moscow party line". Organized labor, the main public advocate of the bill, had lost much of its goodwill from the American people in a series of unpopular strikes. Following the outbreak of the Korean War, President Truman was finally forced to abandon the W-M-D Bill. Although Mr. Truman was not able to create the health program he desired, he was successful in publicizing the issue of health care in America. During his Presidency, the not-for-profit health insurance fund Blue Shield-Blue Cross grew from 28 million policies to over 61 million. When on July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare bill into law at the Harry S. Truman library & Museum, he said that it "all started really with the man from Independence".
There's a lot there that's eerily familiar, isn't there? It was Harry Truman who ordered the deployment of nuclear weapons in Japan, arguably ending the war, and his political opponents
still not only felt comfortable questioning his patriotism, but succeeded in killing his plan. It took twenty years for even a sliver of Truman's plan to get through and it's become a tremendous success. Today, the most popular healthcare plan in America is Medicare -- what Truman's (and Johnson's) political opponents derided as "socialized medicine."
Fifty-nine years later, another Democratic president is being accused of trying to "jam" a healthcare reform bill through congress. Fifty-nine years is just too fast... [
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