Healthcare Issues

Healthcare Issues

Introduction

Although healthcare has always been a major social issue, it is considered to have first become a major political issue in the mid-1940s. As World War II came to a close and the American public concentrated on domestic issues, one growing concern was that citizens in the middle-income bracket were struggling to access adequate healthcare (Harry, 1995). In order to raise the issue to priority status, President Harry S. Truman recommended a national healthcare program during a special address to the U.S. Congress on November 19, 1945. While Truman's message marked the first time a sitting president publicly endorsed a national healthcare program, healthcare has actually been a long-standing issue with complex roots and numerous interests that have combined to make it an inescapable political issue.

Healthcare Issues

Healthcare as an issue has focused on the question of whether—or to what extent—it is the responsibility of government to subsidize healthcare for its citizens. While Thomas Paine had earlier written about it, the subject first substantively appeared on political agendas in 1854, when President Franklin Pierce vetoed a national mental health bill on the basis that it would be unconstitutional to regard health as anything but a private matter in which government should not become involved. At the time, most Americans agreed (Harry, 1995). Private charities and groups, community authorities, and religious institutions were left to provide services for the sick, elderly, and poor whose families could not assume their health needs. This trend largely continued for the next several decades, but gradually shifted as the United States became more industrialized and urbanized. By the early 20th century, conservative and liberal political agendas, legislative debates, and campaign platforms included stances on healthcare. Conservatives tended to call for limited government oversight of healthcare, while liberals appealed for some form of government-funded health insurance (Robert, 2004).

At the same time, informed readers and intellectuals had begun to read about, and give praise to, the models of tax-supported health insurance programs that cropped up all over Europe. Among this crowd was a small cohort led by social-workers who lobbied for industrial-sickness insurance that could protect laborers' financial well being in the event of workplace accidents. In the run-up to the 1912 presidential election, such a group of health reform advocates had become a coordinated movement. They chose to support the Progressive nominee, Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt, the health reform advocates believed, would better advance their cause than ...