14. Roosevelt nearly introduced national health insurance as part of Social Security
Throughout 1934 and into 1935 Roosevelt received conflicting advice over the creation of national health insurance through a program similar to Social Security. His closest advisors were divided over the issue, and his personal physician opposed it on the grounds that medical practitioners would not receive it well, since it would impact what they could charge their patients. Yet it was the ferocity of the debate over Social Security which caused the president to decide not to introduce legislation to create national health insurance, funded through payroll taxes.
Resistance to Social Security was virulent among Republican conservatives. “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers and to prevent any possibility of the employers providing work for the people”, claimed Republican Representative John Taber of New York. Another New Yorker in Congress, James Wadsworth, stated federal power would become, “so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants”.