The Walt Disney Company (DIS)’s Colorful Origins and the Birth of Medicare

The dawn of the Great Society
After four years of political battles, punctuated by the assassination of a popular president, Medicare and Medicaid became law on July 30, 1965. First proposed by President John F. Kennedy and shepherded through to completion by his successor, President Lyndon Johnson, the Social Security Amendments of 1965 represented the biggest shift in government health policy in American history — one that had been decades in the making.

National health insurance had been proposed in various forms since Theodore Roosevelt’s unsuccessful third-party run for the presidency in 1912. It had been left out of the original Social Security Act, but it was revived as part of President Harry Truman’s “Fair Deal.” This effort, though likewise unsuccessful, shifted the conversation around national health insurance toward the later Medicare standard of care for the elderly.

Kennedy’s revival of the issue bore many similarities to the bill that was eventually passed in 1965, including a focus on Americans 65 or older and a payroll tax to be split evenly between employer and employee. A Democratic landslide in 1964 gave President Johnson the support needed to pass the program, which was signed within the first year of Johnson’s first full term. In honor of Truman’s efforts, Johnson made the 81-year-old former president the first beneficiary of the new program by presenting him with a Medicare card at the signing ceremony.

Today, after decades of changing population trends and rising health-care costs, the U.S. government’s annual Medicare and Medicaid expenditures have swelled to nearly $1 trillion before adjustments. Net benefit payments now total $560 billion each year to Medicare recipients and $260 billion to Medicaid recipients. There were nearly 48 million Americans enrolled in Medicare in 2010. At the same time, more than 61 million Americans, many of them children, receive some Medicaid assistance each year.

The article Disney’s Colorful Origins and the Birth of Medicare originally appeared on Fool.com and is written by Alex Planes.

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