maiden program doesn’t succeed, since proponents can argue that the
limitation itself had hamstrung their pet project. The Kerr-Mills Act
presented universal coverage agitators both options: they could point to
spotty coverage for seniors across the country while showing that many
were still left out in the cold. Within months of its signing by President
Dwight Eisenhower, the act was challenged by newly inaugurated
President John F. Kennedy in his 1961 State of the Union address when he
called for a federal Social Security–linked program to provide hospital
insurance to the fourteen million Americans over age sixty-five.
The King-Anderson bill was introduced soon after Kennedy’s speech,
with the proposal of compulsory coverage for hospital and nursing home
care for seniors. Dubbed “Medicare,” the King-Anderson bill enjoyed
support among unions and liberals, but was opposed by the AMA, business
groups, and conservatives. The co-sponsor of the Kerr-Mills Act was
Wilbur Mills, a Democrat from Arkansas who had risen to the powerful
position as the chair of the House Ways and Means Committee during the
Kennedy administration. At the time, there were still many “conservative
Democrats” in the House and Senate, and Chairman Mills was one of
them. From the beginning, the King-Anderson bill faced an uphill battle,
starting with the slim margin of victory that Kennedy had secured in his
defeat of Richard Nixon in 1960. Representative Mills worked for years to
modify the legislation and secure the necessary votes to get it out of
committee, but roadblocks by the AMA and other lobbies stalled the bill
(saying nothing of Mills’s own recalcitrance).
Less than three years into his term, President Kennedy was assassinated
on November 23, 1963. “Two days before Kennedy’s death, Washington
Post columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak wrote, ‘As long as
Mills keeps opposing health care financed through the Social Security
system, President Kennedy’s plan is doomed in the Ways and Means
Committee.’”^17 Democrats enjoyed landslide victories in the House and
Senate, and President Johnson vowed to make civil rights and Medicare a
priority as part of his “Great Society”; he knew that the emotional time
was ripe during the “honeymoon” first session of his presidency.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act (1964) occurred in the “twilight of
a New Deal dispensation that stretched back thirty years,”^18 but which
could not have happened during the Truman or Eisenhower (or even FDR)
administrations. The Democratic Party had dominated national politics for