Harry S. Truman: Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program

On November 19, 1945, President Harry S. Truman sent his Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program, in which he proposed a dramatic expansion of the federal government's role in the nation's health care system. A major goal of the plan was to ensure that all communities—small or large, rich or poor—had access to doctors and hospitals. He emphasized that such measures were urgently needed, pointing out that some 1,200 counties, representing 40 percent of the nation's counties and 15 million people, lacked a local hospital or had one that failed to meet the minimum standards of national professional associations.

Truman's proposals resulted in a bill that would enact his proposals as expansions of Social Security. The bill, cosponsored by Senator Robert Wagner of New York, Senator James Murray of Montana, and Representative John Dingell of Michigan, ran into intense opposition. The American Medical Association vigorously opposed the bill, characterizing Truman's proposals as socialized medicine in a cold war environment when the nation's distrust of Socialism and Communism was growing. A major supporter of the bill was organized labor, but the public was also growing distrustful of unions because of a series of unpopular strikes after World War II.

After the Korean War broke out in 1950, Truman was forced to abandon the bill, although he had succeeded in drawing attention to the issue of health care in America. During his presidency, the number of policies issued by the nonprofit health insurance fund Blue Cross–Blue Shield more than doubled. In later years, other presidents tried to tackle the health care system. President Lyndon B. Johnson enjoyed some success when he signed a Medicare and Medicaid bill into law in 1965. In the early 1990s President Bill Clinton put his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in charge of a task force whose goal was to propose comprehensive health care reform (an effort that failed). In 2010 President Barack Obama was able to persuade Congress to pass a major—and highly controversial—health care bill, one that again, sixty years later, was attacked by conservatives as an effort to implement socialized medicine rather than rely on the free-market system.