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History of U.S. health care reform in images

Mon, 08/17/2009 - 20:37

The original Astroturf campaign. This 1918 brochure was promulgated to defeat health care reform in New York State. University of Rochester historian Theodore Brown says historians traced the addresses on the brochure back to the addresses of two private health insurers. The insurers ran a front campaign that appealed to public fears to defeat health care reform.

 

Going positive... but not winning. This 1919 image was part of the American Labor Legislative Review's response to the "Labor's Attitude" brochure. The ALLR, with the broader Progressive movement, started the campaign in 1918 for state health coverage.

 

Another attempt.In the late 1940s, President Harry S. Truman tried to pass a robust health care reform bill. Here, he's speaking to the 1949 Convention of the American Federation of Labor.

 

Red-baiting in the Operating Room. Truman was unable to get his health bill passed. The same scare tactics and red baiting by health insurance companies and the medical establishment turned the public against health care reform. Editorial cartoons like this one were far from subtle in trying to tie health care reform to communism.

 

More red-baiting metaphors. Another 1940s era cartoon that equates health care reform with communism. In this one, the Soviet-controlled scissors of socialized medicine cut the hair of U.S. medical science.

 

Coverage for the poor and elderly. Lyndon Johnson signing Medicare & Medicaid as part of the Social Security Act. Johnson was the first president to pass substantive health care reform in the United States.

 

New era, same scare tactics. More recently, government efforts at expanding health coverage have been similarly equated with the bogeyman of socialism, as in this cartoon about the State Childrens Health Insurance Program.

 

How does this happen anyway? After nearly a century of red-baiting every effort at health care reform, insurance companies and the medical establishment have effectively convinced many Americans to oppose reforms that would benefit them. Or in the case of this recent cartoon, reforms that they already enjoy.