NEJM October 25, 2017
Perspective
In April 1946, President Harry Truman introduced a single-payer health plan and met the same reaction that would greet Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and his colleagues when they proposed “Medicare for All” in September 2017. “It is believed by competent Congressional observers to have little chance of approval,” reported the New York Times back in 1949. Newsweek was blunter: “No chance at all.” Neither Truman nor Sanders even bothered to include financing for their plans. Truman had no more success with a scaled-back proposal to cover only people over 65 years of age, but 13 years later President Lyndon Johnson signed the Truman revision into law as Medicare, declaring that the United States was finally harvesting “the seeds of...
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