Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the U.S. House of Representatives by Robert Draper

Author:Robert Draper [Draper, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Politics, History, Azizex666, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9781451642094
Google: tRPu1v4ofL8C
Amazon: 1451642083
Barnesnoble: 1451642083
Goodreads: 13259699
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2012-04-24T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Winning Message

On the morning of April 7, 1965, the chairman of the Democratic Study Group, Congressman Frank Thompson of New Jersey, sent out a memo to all members of that now-defunct coalition of liberal Democrats. It urged them to “be on the House floor during the debate on HR 6675 to prevent delaying tactics of opponents, time-consuming quorum calls, and other dilatory maneuvers so that this important part of our Democratic legislative program can be passed by an overwhelming margin.”

Thompson was referring to the Mills bill, which would later be known as the Medicare bill. The American Medical Association had bitterly opposed any form of national health insurance since such a measure was first brought to the House floor by John Dingell Sr. in 1943. Back then, the elder Dingell scoffed at the claims made by the physicians’ lobbying organization. “Socialized medicine, of course, is just a bugaboo,” the Detroit congressman said on a radio program in 1945. “It is a coined phrase, it is just a lot of medical bunk peddled by the physicians’ organization organized in Chicago and fighting the battle for the reactionaries within the medical profession.”

But the AMA succeeded in defeating Dingell Sr.’s early efforts to enact a national health insurance program. Now, in 1965, it aimed for a similar outcome with this new initiative. Early in the year, the AMA launched a $3–4 million nationwide advertising campaign—with airtime on 346 TV and 722 radio stations—in an effort to squash a preliminary version of the legislation. AMA president Donovan F. Ward condemned the bill as “a cruel hoax—a lure, not a cure, for the problems of the aged.”

The massive lobbying effort had the unintended effect of driving the process underground, into the lair of Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills, the wily Arkansas Democrat who in previous years had played a key role in sinking attempts to provide federally funded health care for the elderly. Following the enormous gains made by Democrats in the 1964 election, Mills now believed that President Lyndon Johnson had the votes and therefore elected to lead the parade rather than be trampled by it. With the help of future Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski, and behind closed doors, Mills tied House Resolution 6675 to that year’s Social Security amendments. It used payroll taxes to finance hospital insurance for senior citizens. It also provided 50 percent federal coverage for their health insurance and assisted the elderly poor through federal and state matching funds. This so-called three-layer cake came to the House floor on April 7, 1965, under a closed rule with no opportunity to amend the bill—meaning, it would be a fully baked cake or no cake at all.

The Speaker pro tempore who banged the gavel when Medicare passed the House on April 8, 1965, was thirty-eight-year-old John Dingell. President Johnson signed it into law on July 30, declaring, “No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.” Three months later, the AMA announced that it would not boycott the new legislation.

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