400 ChaPter^8
American education system was a mess. Due to the Baby Boom, classrooms
were overcrowded and underfunded. In America’s largest cities, about 60 per-
cent of High School students were dropping out. He thus had made federal
support of education a major issue in his 1964 campaign and, upon reelection
was able to secure passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Under
the new act, federal monies would be sent principally to those school districts
in which most family incomes were less than $2000 a year [a little under
$15,000 in today’s dollars]. To appease the Catholics opposed to government
aid to the poor, LBJ made aid available to parochial school students, but not
to the schools themselves. The president saw the new program as a great suc-
cess, claiming that millions of poor boys and girls now had access to language
and reading training, audio-visual equipment, specialized education for pre-
schoolers, nurses, counselors, bilingual teachers, and, for adults, special classes
for High School dropouts. The law, as liberals saw it, was attending to
America’s education emergency.
On the other end of the life cycle, Johnson also recognized that the
nation’s elderly lacked adequate health care, and he attacked that problem
with vigor as well. Old people had only about half the income of younger
Americans but had 3 times more hospital visits, and did not have sufficient
health insurance, a situation still being addressed in the 21st century with so-
called Obamacare. The president thus proposed a national Medicare program
in which the government, using contributions to the Social Security fund,
would provide health care for Americans over the age of 65, getting Congress
to pass the bill despite claims from the powerful Medical and Insurance lob-
bies that it would usher in “Socialized medicine,” a charge also thrown at the
Affordable Care Act that passed in 2010. Medicare included a voluntary insur-
ance program to cover doctors and surgical fees, with the government and
senior citizens splitting the premium payments. Congress then expanded the
program more dramatically yet, extending coverage to the poor, regardless of
age, in the Medicaid program. Under Medicaid, states would receive matching
federal funds to pay the bills of welfare recipients or the medically indigent—
the blind, disabled, and so forth— whom did not receive welfare but neither
could afford to pay for health care.
Johnson proclaimed the new Medicare system a huge victory. “No longer
will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine,” he
declared at the signing ceremony, “no longer will illness crush and destroy the