Truman’s health plan was stymied by opponents

Oct. 22--When President Harry S. Truman renewed his call for national health care during a 1948 campaign stop in Rochester, he was returning to a fight he already had waged for years.

Truman, a Democrat, first proposed a national health care plan on Nov. 19, 1945, only seven months after succeeding Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House.

The president, according to the Truman Library and Museum, put forth a five-point plan that involved federal funding to alleviate inequalities in the American health care system. He proposed a national health insurance plan, run by the federal government and open to all citizens.

"It was not out of step with the rest of the world at that time," said Chad Israelson, a history instructor at Rochester Community & Technical College. In those immediate postwar years, several European countries, including America's World War II ally Great Britain, were designing and adopting government health care systems.

In America, though, Truman's plan met with fierce resistance.

"I consider it socialism," said Sen. Robert A. Taft, the senior Republican. "It is to my mind the most socialistic measure this Congress has ever had before it."

To help fight Truman's plan, the American Medical Association assessed its members an extra $25 each. In 1945 alone, the AMA spent $1.5 million in lobbying efforts to kill the plan -- the most expensive lobbying effort in American history up to that point, according to Physicians for a National Health Program.

Facing a Republican Congress and the opposition from the AMA, Truman's plan had no chance.

However, on his famous 1948 whistle-stop campaign, most notably during a stop in Rochester, Truman made another strong pitch for a national health plan. "The people who can afford better health will make greater prosperity and a strong nation," Truman said in Rochester.

Truman's come-from-behind victory in the presidential race in 1948 brought with it a Democratic Congress and should have given new life to his health plan.

Many of those Democrats, though, were from the South.

"The southern Democrats were really conservative," Israelson said. Their opposition to federal initiatives stymied Truman's plan. Part of that also might have been payback for Truman's relatively strong Civil Rights record, which included desegregating the armed forces.

More importantly, though, the opponents of federal health insurance, including the AMA, were able to tie the proposal to a growing fear of communism in the postwar world. By the time America entered the Korean War in 1950, Truman's health care plan was on life support.

Truman left office in 1953 having failed to get his national health plan passed. It was left to labor unions, at that time a strong force, to bargain for health insurance packages as part of workers' contracts -- a practice that eventually spread throughout the workforce.

Truman, though, lived to see the day when at least a portion of his plan was adopted. When President Lyndon Johnson (who later served on the Mayo Board of Trustees) signed the Medicare bill into law in 1965, he did it in Truman's hometown, with the former president at his side. "It all started really with the man from Independence," Johnson said.

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