July 30, 1965, is a date that should be etched in fire across the conscience of this nation.
On that day, in a ceremony more revolutionary than any Fourth of July, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicaid into law—not with a flourish, but with the grim determination of a man who knew he was handing a lit match to a country soaked in kerosene.
For the first time, the United States dared to declare that even its poorest citizens deserved dignity, that a child in Appalachia and a widow in Chicago had the same right to see a doctor as any Park Avenue plutocrat.
It was an act of moral arithmetic so simple it enraged the powerful: human life, they learned that day, could not be allowed to carry a price tag.
But six decades later, the ledger has been reopened. The same forces that howled in 1965—the insurance barons, the think-tank eugenicists, the politicians who still believe illness is God’s way of culling the herd—have returned with scalpels in hand.
Under the banner of “fiscal responsibility,” they have spent the last year dismantling Medicaid piece by piece, stripping 17 million people of coverage, and turning food stamps into a Dickensian workhouse where the hungry must prove their worth.
All to fund a $4.5 trillion tax cut for the same oligarchs who’ve spent lifetimes profiting from human suffering.
The numbers are not abstractions.
Ten million Americans—vanished from insurance rolls. Three million more barred from food assistance. Rural hospitals shuttering at a rate of one per week, their morgues filling with patients who died waiting for treatment they could no longer afford.
And at the center of it all, a Republican Party that has abandoned even the pretense of governing, now openly treating survival as a privilege reserved for the productive.
“Those safety nets are meant for a small population,” sneered House Speaker Mike Johnson, as if poverty were a moral failing rather than the inevitable byproduct of his own party’s economic sadism.
The cruelty is the point.
When Johnson created Medicaid, he did so with the understanding that a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its most vulnerable.
Today’s GOP has inverted that logic—their vision of America is a Darwinist carnival where the sick are ushered quietly into early graves to pad quarterly earnings reports.
They have turned Lyndon Johnson’s legacy into a corpse on a gurney, waiting for the last life-support machine to be unplugged.
And yet—there are still those who remember what solidarity means.
After voting to strip nearly $1 trillion from the health program, Congressman Tom Kean, Jr. lied, “I voted to safeguard Medicaid for every intended beneficiary in the Garden State and nationwide.”
“This isn’t just policy, it’s blood shed as part of a brutal class war against working class Americans,” snarled progressive firebrand Lisa McCormick, her voice sharp enough to cut steel. “They’re not ‘reforming’ Medicaid, they’re murdering it. Every politician who voted for this atrocity should be forced to look into the eyes of the parents who’ll bury their children because they couldn’t afford insulin. Let history record them as what they are: accomplices to genocide by spreadsheet.”
Before he was the smiling face of conservative mythmaking, Ronald Reagan was just another B-list actor shilling for corporate interests—nowhere more infamously than in his 1961 LP Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, a propaganda record funded by the American Medical Association to torpedo Medicare.
In his honeyed, folksy tones, Reagan spun apocalyptic fantasies of “socialized medicine” leading to dictatorship, warning that if Americans dared to demand healthcare as a right, they’d wake up in “bondage” under Soviet-style tyranny.
The irony, of course, is that this hysterical screed—dripping with red-baiting paranoia—was itself a weapon of oppression, designed to keep millions of seniors destitute and untreated rather than let the “wrong” people get care.
Reagan’s fearmongering didn’t stop Medicare, but it did blueprint the GOP’s decades-long war on public health, from Medicaid block grants to Obamacare sabotage.
Today, as Republicans gut healthcare for the poor to fund tax cuts for billionaires, they’re still playing from Reagan’s script—proving that some records should have stayed broken.
The fight is far from over.
“The One Big Beautiful Bill Act will make life much more difficult for the average older adult, especially vulnerable older Americans,” said Ramsey Alwin, CEO of the National Council on Aging (NCOA). “About 27 million households with adults aged 60+ cannot afford their basic living needs. The act’s drastic cuts to the programs they rely on to make ends meet means more older Americans fall into poverty.”
“One in five older adults gets their health insurance through Medicaid, including 5 million who are enrolled in Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act,” said Alwin. “Ending that coverage means these struggling older adults will lose access to afford doctor visits, medicine, and more.”
“Sixty years ago, 48% of Americans 65 and older lacked health insurance,” said Shin-Ming Wong, a board member at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights. “Those who did have insurance often had inadequate and expensive policies with limited coverage. By 1968, three years after the Medicare program started, the number of uninsured elders had dropped to 2%. Today, more than 40% of babies are born to mothers who have Medicaid, and it is the major source of public support for pregnant women, infants and children.”
The GOP Medicaid cuts also directly impact Medicare, specifically the programs enacted to help low-income older Americans afford their premiums and copayments. Many paid and unpaid caregivers for older adults also rely on Medicaid for their own health coverage.
“Before Medicare and Medicaid, tens of millions of Americans lived in fear of illness,” said Federation of American Hospitals President Chip Kahn. “Sixty years ago today, that all changed with the presidential signature on a new law that brought peace of mind and a new era of access to medical care. In the decades since, our nation has proudly built on the promise of care for our most vulnerable, but today that promise is under threat.”
Sixty years ago, a president stared down the wolves of capital and chose life. The question now is whether we still dare to do the same.