From the Frances Perkins Center in Newcastle:
We all have something to celebrate! Seventy-four years ago, on August 14th, 1935, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act into law. Frances Perkins considered the passage of the Social Security Act her greatest accomplishment.
The Act provided benefits to retirees and the unemployed. It also allocated money to states to provide assistance to elderly individuals, unemployment insurance, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Maternal and Child Welfare, public health services, and the blind.
Today it's especially poignant to remember that a national health insurance plan was originally included in the drafting of the Act. This provision was squelched by the American Medical Association, which threatened to sink the entire bill if health insurance were included.
Secretary Perkins alluded to this in a letter she wrote to President Roosevelt on December 1, 1944:
Make the jump:
With one major exception all the items we discussed as "among the practical possibilities" before you took office as President have been accomplished or begun. That exception is a social security item providing for some form of benefit to persons where loss of income is due to sickness and provision for appropriate medical care for the same.
I hope that this will be upon your agenda for the near future.
Faithfully yours,
Frances Perkins
We can only imagine what life in the USA would be like today if Roosevelt hadn't died five months later, before he and Frances Perkins had a chance to pass their national health insurance plan.
Seventy-four years later, we still do not have a national health care system that covers every American. Hopefully it will not take seventy-five years.