September 26, 1994: President Clinton's Health Care Reform Effort Dies

September 26, 1994: What had been considered a great chance at achieving some form of health care reform dies. It would take another 16 years, and 2 Presidents, before another serious attempt was made.

In 1992, Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas ran for President, and national health care was a big part of his platform. He made the point that there were only two industrialized nations without national health care: The United States of America, and South Africa. At the time, South Africa was not a country you wanted your own to be compared to.

Clinton won in a landslide, mainly due to the state of the American economy as a whole, but health care was a big part of it. On September 22, 1993, Clinton made a major speech to Congress, announcing a program that was aimed at achieving universal coverage through a national health care plan. This was one of the most prominent items on Clinton's legislative agenda, and resulted from a task force headed by First Lady Hillary Clinton.

The plan was hardly extreme, or radical. It was not as far to the left as the plan put forward by former President Theodore Roosevelt when he ran to regain the office in 1912; or as far to the left as the plan put forward by President Harry Truman as part of his Fair Deal program in 1949; or even as far to the left as the plan put forward by President Richard Nixon in 1974. (He may have thought it would convince Democrats to focus on that instead of Watergate. They didn't.)

But pretty much every conservative in America, in public office and in the media, called the Clinton plan "Communism," "Socialism," "socialized medicine," "extreme," and, in reflection of the fact that the First Lady was unpopular, "Hillarycare."

There had been a tradition where, since the Presidency had to be respected, and the President himself couldn't be attacked, another major figure in the office faced the vitriol. For Franklin Roosevelt, it was his wife and chief advisor, Eleanor. For Harry Truman, it was Secretary of State Dean Acheson. For Dwight D. Eisenhower, it was Chief of Staff Sherman Adams. For John F. Kennedy, it was his brother and Attorney General, Robert F. Kennedy.

The Vietnam War made it possible for Lyndon Johnson to become the 1st President to really face that kind of anger, and so every President since has faced it. Still, conservatives hated Hillary more than they hated Bill.

Senator Bob Dole of Kansas, the Minority Leader, practically already running for President in the 1996 election, led the chorus of Republicans saying, "America has the best health care system in the world" (ignoring the fact that America had the worst way of paying for it), and, "There isn't any crisis in health care" (which, for millions of Americans, was a bald-faced lie).

The American Medical Association, which led the opposition that stopped Truman's measure when it looked like a done deal, launched a multimedia assault. On September 8, 1993, the Health Insurance Association of America (HIAA) launched the "Harry and Louise" ads, a series showing a couple, played by Harry Johnson and Louise Clare Clark, worrying about what the Clinton plan would do to their lives.

Not to America on the whole, as they never mentioned the dreaded words "socialized medicine." To themselves, on a personal level, in a way that was intended to resonate with the average American family. It sure did: Support for Hillarycare crashed.

Clinton was willing to compromise a little, as long as whatever bill that hit his desk covered everybody. But on January 25, 1994, he delivered the State of the Union Address, and threw down the gauntlet. He held up a pen, and told Congress:

I want to make this very clear. I am open, as I have said repeatedly, to the best ideas of concerned Members of both Parties. I have no special brief for any specific approach, even in our own bill, except this: If you send me legislation that does not guarantee every American private health insurance that can never be taken away, you will force me to take this pen, veto the legislation, and we'll come right back here and start all over again.

But I don't think that's going to happen. I think we're ready to act now. I believe that you're ready to act now. And if you're ready to guarantee every American the same health care that you have, health care that can never be taken away, now -- not next year, or the year after -- now is the time to stand with the people who sent us here, now.

He thought he had the cards. Or maybe he didn't think so, and he thought he could bluff. He couldn't. On January 10, the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, which was key to drafting a bill, had gone on NBC's Sunday morning news program, Meet the Press. His name was Daniel Patrick "Pat" Moynihan.

He told the show's moderator, Tim Russert, who had once been an aide of his, "We don't have a health care crisis in this country. But we do have a welfare crisis." It was a shocking remark to a Democratic viewer not old enough to remember 1965. It was not shocking to those old enough to remember that year, when, as Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon B. Johnson, Moynihan had issued a report that essentially blamed black people for their own poverty.

Such a belief forced him out of the Administration, but also led the next President, Nixon, a Republican, to bring him back. Moynihan got elected to the Senate in 1976, and was beloved by his New York constituents for bring home helpful projects -- "pork-barrel spending," or just "pork," in Washington lingo -- but he never lifted a finger for health care reform in his long political career.

This time, when it was absolutely necessary, he refused to even hold a hearing on a reform bill, Clinton's or anyone else's. Not even the Republicans' own alternative to it, which was basically a compromise that kept private insurance, but allowed Medicaid to accept costs.

Other Committee Chairmen -- Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts on Senate Labor and Human Resources, Robert Byrd of West Virginia on Senate Appropriations, Jim Sasser of Tennessee on Senate Budget, Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois on House Ways and Means -- held hearings. Moynihan, on Senate Finance? Not one hearing. I have never forgiven him for that.

That same year, South Africa held its first all-races election. Nelson Mandela's party won. He was sworn in as President. The first bill he signed into law had nothing specific to do with easing race relations. It was to establish national health care.

That left only one industrialized nation without it. "God bless America."

Clinton had been juggling priorities, "spending his political capital" as best he could, basically running out of that capital to get the Crime Bill passed on September 13, 1994. On September 26, Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the Majority Leader, announced that no further hearings would be held, accepting the truth that they would be a waste of time. Clinton accepted this. It was a surrender.

The Democrats paid for their successful effort to pass a crime bill with gun control legislation, and for their failed effort to pass "socialized medicine": On November 8, the Republicans won the Congressional elections, winning majorities in both houses.

Times changed. In 2008, the same actors who played Harry and Louise appeared in a short film that aired at the Democratic National Convention, saying that it was time to reform health care. In 2010, the Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare -- basically, the main Republican alternative to Hillarycare in 1993-94 -- passed, without one single Republican vote. Again, the Republicans called it "extreme" and "socialized medicine." This time, they lost, and the American people won.

As of September 26, 2022, Harry Johnson and Louise Clare Clark are still alive. (UPDATE: Harry died in 2024.)

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September 26, 1994 was a Monday. Baseball's Strike of '94 was on, and the remainder of the season, including the postseason, had been canceled. It was too early for the NBA and NHL seasons to start. There was 1 score on this historic day: On ABC Monday Night Football, the Buffalo Bills beat the Denver Broncos, 27-20 at Rich Stadium in the Buffalo suburb of Orchard Park, New York. The stadium would later be renamed Ralph Wilson Stadium, New Era Field, Bills Stadium and Highmark Stadium.

March 1, 1965: The Moynihan Report

March 1, 1965: The Moynihan Report is released, although that is not its title, and the name "Moynihan" doesn't appear anywhere on it. That's the name that it got, because some people insist upon assigning credit, while others insist upon assigning blame.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan may have seemed like the most Irish of New Yorkers, but he was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1927, before moving to Hell's Kitchen on Manhattan's West Side with his family as a boy. He worked as a longshoreman before getting a free education at City College of New York, then serving in the U.S. Navy during World War II, and getting a Ph.D. in history from Tufts University, in the Boston suburb of Medford, Massachusetts.

"Pat" went to the London School of Economics, where he began to cultivate, in his own words, "a taste for Savile Row suits, rococo conversational riffs and Churchillian oratory," even as he maintained that "nothing and no one at LSE ever disposed me to be anything but a New York Democrat who had some friends who worked on the docks and drank beer after work."

He worked on the staff of New York Governor W. Averell Harriman, an old-money Democrat, before being appointed an Assistant Secretary of Labor under President John F. Kennedy. The night that JFK was assassinated, he spoke with Mary McGrory of The Washington Star, invoking the heritage of both of them, and also that of the fallen President: "There's no point in being Irish if you don't know that the world will break your heart eventually."

He remained under the new President, Lyndon B. Johnson, who wanted the Department of Labor to give him as much information as he could for his "War On Poverty." The result was The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, published on March 1, 1965. Moynihan wrote the report on his own initiative, hoping to persuade White House officials that civil-rights legislation, alone, would not produce racial equality. Few people doubted this.

But Moynihan didn't suggest an additional solution, only an additional subject to address: Black families. He pointed out that the out-of-wedlock birthrate was much higher for black people than for white people. And he used the phrase "tangle of pathologies" to describe conditions within black families.

Conservatives loved it: Only 5 months after their epic electoral defeat at LBJ's hands, here was a lifeline, and it was coming from inside their enemy's own house: Not just a sub-Cabinet official, but a man who was respected by both JFK and LBJ. The report seemed to back up their idea that spending money on achieving racial equality shouldn't be done, giving them the justification that it was pointless.

Liberals hated it: The report seemed to "blame the victim" for his own problems. This presaged later conservative "dog whistles," like "race hustler," "poverty pimp," "welfare queen," and "superpredator."

Between the backlash against this report, and LBJ's perception that Moynihan was too close to his intraparty rival, JFK's brother, now-Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, Moynihan realized that his position in the Johnson Administration was untenable. Before the year was out, he resigned to take a professor's position at Harvard University.

But the Republicans remembered. In 1969, the new President, Richard Nixon, appointed Moynihan to be Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy; and, later in the year, as Counselor to the President. (He would be succeeded in these offices by John Ehrlichman and Donald Rumsfeld, respectively.)

But his support for a guaranteed national income, or a "negative income tax," was too close to socialism for Tricky Dick and his tricksters. At the end of 1970, he left the Administration, and went back to Harvard. In 1973, Nixon appointed him to be U.S. Ambassador to India. In 1975, President Gerald Ford appointed him U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. In 1976, despite still officially living in Massachusetts, he ran for the U.S. Senate from New York, for the seat formerly held by RFK, and won it.

He would serve 4 terms, becoming, as I eventually put it, in language that wouldn't go over well today, "a political transvestite." He was reliably Democratic on education, the environment, civil liberties and abortion, and was a reliable vote for federal judges appointed by Democratic Presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. But he seemed to side with the Republicans on taxes, and absolutely sided with them on health care and welfare.

During the health care reform debate in early 1994, he was the Chairman of the Senate's Committee on Finance, which had to approve any reform bill. Clinton had been pushing for universal coverage, saying there was a crisis on the issue. But the Republicans were saying there wasn't any crisis. In other words, the Republicans were lying.

Moynihan appeared as a guest on NBC's Meet the Press, hosted by a former aide of his, Tim Russert, and said, as if he were a Republican, "We don't have a health care crisis in this country. But we do have a welfare crisis." Russert asked him if there would be a new health care reform law. Moynihan said, "Ah, in this Congress? No." By refusing to even consider holding hearings in the Finance Committee on such a bill, he did as much to kill health care reform for the next 16 years as any conservative, in Congress or in the media.

Clinton did sign a welfare reform bill in 1996, after vetoing 2 others he thought too draconian, vetoes that Moynihan criticized on the Senate floor. But, as someone with more days dealing with medical difficulties than days at work between 1994 and 2010, I have never forgiven Moynihan -- or the Republicans -- for killing health care reform, offering it as a sacrifice to the god of welfare reform.

Moynihan continued to officially be a Democrat, while taking some Republican positions, until, bowing to advancing age, he retired in advance of the 2000 election. His seat was won by Hillary Clinton, Bill's wife. She had been careful to get on good terms with him, despite the fact that the health care reform movement was as much her pet project as it was her husband's. So Hillary winning Moynihan's seat must have given both Clintons satisfaction on more than one level.

Moynihan died in 2003. In 2021, something for which he had long advocated and attempted to fund, an expansion of New York's Pennsylvania Station, opened in the former main post office across 8th Avenue. Designed to handle Amtrak traffic, so that the station between 8th and 7th Avenues could handle New Jersey Transit and the Long Island Rail Road more easily, the new facility was named Moynihan Train Hall.

When this honor was offered to him during his lifetime, Moynihan said he didn't want it, saying the building should continue to carry the name it had, honoring James A. Farley, an old-line New York Democrat whom President Franklin D. Roosevelt had named Postmaster General, and who had gotten the building built. Farley died in 1976, the last survivor of FDR's Cabinet (the position is no longer Cabinet-level), and had been pretty much forgotten by people younger than Moynihan and his fans.

If anything, the commuter portion of Penn Station should have been named for Moynihan, given how often he commuted between America's 2 main political parties.

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March 1, 1965 was a Monday. Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. The NHL had no games scheduled. One game was played in the NBA: The Detroit Pistons beat the Cincinnati Royals, 130-110 at the Cincinnati Gardens.