Health Care Reform: What Would LBJ Do? | Mother Jones
By James Ridgeway | Mon November 2, 2009
As the Democratic leadership keeps rolling over to one health care industry demand after another, I’m reminded of a post that I wrote on my Unsilent Generation blog nearly a year ago, as Obama prepared to take office after promising to reform the American health care system. It’s about President Lyndon B. Johnson’s successful effort, back in 1965, to create the Medicare and Medicaid programs–-the only single-payer health care this nation has ever known. Like a lot of LBJ’s War on Poverty programs, they were far from perfect. But compared with what today’s Democrats are offering, they were something close to radical, and represented a triumph of political will on Johnson’s part.
I suspect that if if LBJ were alive today, he might have been able to get a decent reform bill through Congress, without all of the concessions to corporate interests that have rendered the Democrats’ current legislation—including the public option—so weak that it is getting close to meaningless.
Health Care Reform: What Would LBJ Do? | Mother Jones
