Medicare: A Birthday Plea

Today is a birthday. It's the 43rd anniversary of Medicare, and around the country, people who care about health care — or the lack of it — will be taking birthday cakes to their representatives' and senators' offices, asking them to support Rep. John Conyer's H.R. 676 - Improved Medicare for All.

What a paradox it is that 80 percent of Americans think that the government should guarantee health care for everyone, and, yet, there is little political support for it. It is still considered a socialist-leaning proposition, although we are the only industrialized country in the world without a national health-insurance system.

H.R. 676 would provide: primary care and prevention, inpatient care, outpatient care, emergency care, prescription drugs, durable medical equipment, long-term care, mental-health care, dental services (other than cosmetic dentistry), substance-abuse treatment services, chiropractic services, basic vision care and vision correction, and even services such as hearing aids. Everyone with a government-issued health insurance card would be entitled to these services anywhere in the United States without having to pay deductibles, copayments, or coinsurance.

We have come close to having such a system of national health insurance at least twice in the past century. The first time was under Theodore Roosevelt, who supported national health insurance because he believed that no nation could be strong when its people are sick and poor. Many European countries adopted forms of compulsory health insurance around this time, and momentum was building here too, until WWI. As anti-German sentiments and fear of Bolshevism swept the country, health insurance was denounced as a "Prussian menace" or tarred as a communist ploy. A fatal mistake at that time was to include a funeral benefit in the plan. While popular with the working class, it was seen as a threat to the huge insurance industry, which sucked dollars out of the poor who feared a pauper's burial.

It would be another forty years until genuine momentum built again for a form of national health insurance, under President Harry Truman. But this time it was the American Medical Association that was threatened, and they assessed their members a special war tax to wage a $1.5 million anti-insurance campaign, which was at that time the most expensive lobbying effort in the history of the United States. One of their brochures read, "Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of life? Lenin thought so. He declared socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state." Advertisements in national magazines showed drawings of a mother with her baby in a physician's office as a menacing jackbooted soldier, with a bayonet, kicked the door down. Tainted again as a precursor to an inevitable communist takeover, Truman's plan for national health insurance died in a congressional subcommittee.

Who opposes H.R. 676 today? Once again, it is the powerful insurance industry. H.R. 676 proposes to finance its plan, in part, with savings from the 30 to 40 cents on each insurance premium dollar that private insurance companies charge for overhead, marketing, and advertising costs.

This is why there is no political will, despite a large majority of Americans favoring the guarantee of health care for everyone. There is huge lobbying money arrayed against H.R. 676, and too few politicians have the courage to stand up for it, lest they be labeled socialist or communist. Despite this lingering fear, however, 90 representatives have signed on to be cosponsors of this bill.

While I was at UUA General Assembly, in Fort Lauderdale, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents more than 1,000 cities with populations over 30,000, met in Miami and unanimously adopted a resolution supporting H.R. 676. Also endorsing it are 34 state AFL-CIO federations, 110 central labor councils, and more than 445 union organizations.

So today, if you don't have time to take a birthday cake to your senator's or representative's office, send an electronic birthday card and tell her or him to celebrate Medicare's 43rd birthday by supporting H.R. 676. We can have national health insurance. The American people want it. It will do more for the poor, more quickly, than any single poverty alleviation program. H.R. 676 is profoundly about economic justice.