On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare and Medicaid Act into law, insuring a massive population of Americans in the culmination of a fight that had actually begun two decades earlier with President Harry S. Truman and been a major plank of President John F. Kennedy’s legislative agenda.
Following World War II, as America’s population aged, our country began to face a crisis, with only one in eight older Americans able to afford health insurance—and even when they could, private insurers often considered older Americans too risky a population and shied away from insuring them anyway.
Over two decades, lawmakers debated, committees held hearings, proposals were put forward, but little action happened until things came to a crisis point in the early 1960s. With healthcare front of mind, Congress got to work, and in 1965, they finally passed legislation that created Medicare and Medicaid, extending health insurance to retired and impoverished Americans across our country.
It was a massive victory for the health and safety of our people, but it didn’t happen overnight. Progress doesn’t always come quickly; in fact, it can often be frustratingly slow. But that doesn’t mean we give up and stop pushing forward.
Had President Truman not begun his ambitious initial push to expand insurance coverage in the 40s, we assuredly would not have seen that push come to fruition on July 30, 1965. His dream wasn’t realized until long after his time in office, but the fact that he began the fight mattered. Great men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.
The project we’re embarking on—the project to take back our state government, invest in every North Carolinian, and restore opportunity to communities from Andrews to Ahoskie—is also an ambitious one. It will take much, much more than just this one campaign in this one election. But we can’t succeed if we don’t begin.
If we fight hard, if we keep our heads up and keep spreading our message, if we keep going out into every community and showing up for them as Democrats, then this campaign can become a new template for how Democrats can win in our state. We can be the beginning of shifting the political landscape so that we can finally deliver on an agenda that puts working families first. And it will take time to get there, sure. But it starts now. Here. With us.
Please stand with me. Please help us be the start of change in our state. Grassroots power from people like you is what will give us the resources we need to succeed and rewrite what winning looks like for Democrats in North Carolina—so please support this campaign with a grassroots contribution of whatever amount seems right to you.
