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Originally Posted by Coach Pants
Eh?
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With the election of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, Democrats controlled both the Presidency and the Congress, claiming a 2:1 ratio to Republicans in the House and 32 more seats in the Senate. The Democrats in the House Ways and Means Committee shifted away from Southern Democrats, making the committee more sympathetic towards health insurance reform.
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Yes, but by then the focus on national health care had been limited to the elderly, as an expansion of Social Security, because it would be smaller in scope and because health care costs are the greatest cost for the elderly. So while I agree that yes, we'd be in much better shape if the government had had the foresight to institute national health care decades ago, it was pretty much a dead subject by the time 1960 rolled around, so it can't be blamed on Johnson or the Democratic-controlled Congress. Eight years of a Republican administration opposed to national health care between Truman and Kennedy, and a lot of lobbying from the AMA had long since done their work on any chance for national health care.