On July 30, 1965, at the signing of the Medicare amendments to the Social Security Act in Independence Missouri, LBJ said this about Harry Truman and a few others:
Many men can make many proposals. Many men can draft many laws. But few have the piercing and humane eye, which can see beyond the words to the people that they touch. Few can see past the speeches and the political battles … And fewer still have the courage to stake reputation, and position, and the effort of a lifetime upon such a cause when there are so few that share it.
back in what, 2010, Obama gave a speech to a joint session of Congress
In the post analysis on PBS, Califano remarked, we didn’t know about MRIs and stuff like that, we never thought it would cost anything like what it is costing today
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Maybe the “stuff like that” we didn’t know is not so much that MRIs would first be developed for clinical use in the 1970’s but that we would prove unwilling to think rationally about cost, price, and the implications of both for health technology rollout.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/15/why-an-mri-costs-1080-in-america-and-280-in-france/?utm_term=.50fd764e60aa
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