Health reform: Looking back at LBJ and Medicare

Wall Street Journal, August 27, 2009

The Democratic proposals being debated this year could lead to the biggest shift in federal healthcare policy since the advent of Medicare in the 1960s. That raises an interesting question: What did the debate over Medicare look like? There was a big fight—and President Lyndon B. Johnson suppressed the true projected costs of the program as he pushed it through Congress, according to James Morone, a Brown political scientist.