A historic look at health care legislation

-1952: Republican presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower campaigns against national health insurance.

-1954: President Dwight Eisenhower, with the objective of enabling private insurance companies to broaden their coverage, proposes a plan of federal reinsurance for any private company as protection against heavy losses resulting from health insurance. After the first five years, the program would become self-financing with money derived from premiums paid by the insurance companies. The House soundly rejects the plan. Eisenhower calls a conference to try to salvage it and is told the Senate can't fit the plan into its agenda.

-1959: A bill is introduced by Rep. Aime J. Forand, D-R.I., to provide hospital, surgical and nursing home benefits for old-age and survivors insurance beneficiaries using the Social Security administrative mechanism. The program is to be financed by an increase in the Social Security tax. The bill fails.

-1960: Legislation is enacted establishing limited medical assistance for the aged through the Social Security program. The act also provides aid to the states to help "medically indigent" people 65 or older. Participation by states is optional; 25 take part.

-1962: President John F. Kennedy renews his 1961 request that the old-age, survivors and disability provisions of the Social Security Act be amended to provide health insurance protection for the aged.

-1965: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs into law the landmark federal health insurance programs known as Medicare and Medicaid.

-1971: Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., offers his national health insurance plan. The "Health Security Act" calls for a universal single-player plan to be financed through payroll taxes. President Richard Nixon later advances his own version of a bill, the National Health Insurance Partnership Act. It would preserve private insurance but require businesses to provide coverage to employees or make payments to a government-run fund. It also endorses the concept of health maintenance organizations. The bill fails.

-1973: Legislation is enacted to encourage development of health maintenance organizations.

-1974: Nixon proposes his Comprehensive Health Insurance Plan calling for universal coverage, voluntary employer participation and a separate program for the working poor and the unemployed, replacing Medicaid. Organized labor lobbied successfully to kill the plan, hoping get a better deal after the next elections. That didn't happen.

-1977: The Health Care Financing Administration is created to manage Medicare and Medicaid separately from the Social Security Administration.

-1979: Sen. Kennedy proposes that private insurance plans compete for customers who would receive a card to use for hospital and physician's care. Employers would bear the bulk of the cost for their workers, with the government picking up costs for the poor. President Jimmy Carter's plan, released a month later, proposes that businesses provide a minimum package of benefits, that public coverage for the poor and aged be expanded and that a new public corporation created to sell coverage to everyone else. Neither proposal makes it through Congress.

-1985: The Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 (COBRA), signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, mandates an insurance program giving some employees the ability to continue health insurance coverage from their workplace after leaving the job. In addition, hospice care is made a permanent part of Medicare and extended to states for Medicaid.


