Sydney Bild, an 80-year-old retired doctor who’s been lobbying for a national health care plan for more than 50 years, was recently invited to a luncheon held in the Loop as part of Cover the Uninsured Week. He says the publicist in charge of the event, which was sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, asked him not even to mention the idea of a national plan. “She told me the event’s limited to information about the plight of the uninsured,” he says. “Speakers were told not to offer any solutions. It was just to acquaint people with how terrible the situation was–as if people don’t know how terrible it is. To me it seemed like an exercise in futility–another study, another report.”
According to Bild, the fiercest opposition to a national plan in the 50s came from the American Medical Association. “The AMA opposed it because they had a fundamental opposition to health insurance, as hard as that sounds given our current situation,” he says. “When I was a kid growing up in the 30s we paid for health care out of pocket. It was ‘an apple a day keeps the doctor away.’ You didn’t visit the doctor unless you had to. There was no thought of preventive medicine. The AMA wasn’t even a big fan of private health insurance. They were suspicious of it. Health insurance had been introduced in Germany under Bismarck, and it had become associated with the idea of socialism. The AMA’s attitude was they didn’t want the government telling them what to do. They hated anything that could come between a patient and doctors.”
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By the end of the 1980s the skyrocketing cost of health care had forced many companies to either drop or dilute the insurance plans they offered employees. About 37 million Americans had no insurance, and businesses that still had plans strained to keep up with the cost. “From 1965 to 1989,” writes Theda Skocpol, in the 1996 Boomerang: Clinton’s Health Security Effort and the Turn Against Government in U.S. Politics, “business spending on health benefits climbed from 2.2 percent to 8.3 percent of wages and salary.”
Within a year Clinton’s initiative was dead. The closest his administration came to a national plan was Kid Care, a system in which the children of poor people–but not the poor people themselves–were guaranteed free health service.
Bild has been disappointed with the reaction to his lobbying, particularly among people he sees as his natural allies. A lot of those people attended the series of local events sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during Cover the Uninsured Week. A press release about the events posted on the foundation’s Web site says, “All of us business and labor groups, health care leaders, elected officials, universities, faith communities need to work together to help every member of our community understand the plight of those who go without health coverage of any kind. The week provides opportunities for people from all walks of life and every point of view to come together to increase the visibility of the problem, help their uninsured neighbors and begin a reasoned public discussion of proposed solutions to this problem.”
