Medicare it ain't but it is the biggest progressive win since Reagan was elected

I remember the passage of Medicare.  I was in college and little concerned with public matters.  That would come with the draft and escalation of the war in Vietnam by Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Johnson was a great President who made a fatal error - inability to think his way out of war in Vietnam.  The civil rights bill, the War on Poverty, and Medicare were his great accomplishments.


Since Reagan principally, public debate has been dominated by the conservative attacks on "entitlements".  It wasn't always so: the Department now known as HHS (Health and Human Services( was then known as HEW (Health Education & Welfare).  This relentless ideological assault on the modest social democracy of the Democratic Party has shaped public debate - so that we end up with a private insurance program - rather than the expansion of Medicare and single-payer plan that I, like most progressives, would have preferred.  Important  as this is, it is not Social Security, not Medicare.  But it IS the biggest progressive victory in Congress since Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980.  And it is Obama's victory.  Gives us Hope.