# Harry S. Truman — "The health of this Nation is a national concern" > [!quote] "We should resolve now that the health of this Nation is a national concern; that financial barriers in the way of attaining health shall be removed; that the health of all its citizens deserves the help of all the Nation." > — Harry S. Truman, Special Message to the Congress Recommending a Comprehensive Health Program, November 19, 1945 ## Context Truman sent the message three months into his first full autumn as president and ten weeks after the Japanese surrender. It was the health chapter of the [[Economic Bill of Rights]] he had laid out in his September 6, 1945 reconversion message to Congress, which in turn descended from [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]]'s "second Bill of Rights" address of January 1944. The message opens by citing that lineage explicitly and quoting two of its entries: "The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health," and the "right to adequate protection from the economic fears of . .. sickness ...." The sentence quoted here is the hinge of the document. Everything before it is diagnosis; everything after it is program. The diagnosis rested on the draft: Selective Service had classified nearly 5 million male registrants aged 18 to 37 as unfit for military service as of April 1, 1945 — about **30 percent of all those examined**, and 49 percent among men aged 34 to 37. Over a third of Women's Army Corps applicants were rejected on the same grounds. Truman's point was that this was a national fact with national causes, not an aggregation of private bad luck. The program that followed had five parts: federal aid for hospital construction, expanded public health and maternal-child services, support for medical education and research, prepayment of medical costs through an expansion of compulsory social insurance, and cash benefits replacing wages lost to sickness and disability. Anticipating the attack, Truman wrote the rebuttal into the message twice: "This is not socialized medicine," and later, "I repeat — what I am recommending is not socialized medicine." ## Why this matters It did not save the proposal. The [[American Medical Association]] mounted the largest lobbying campaign in American history to that point against compulsory health insurance, and the epithet Truman tried to disarm in advance became the durable American frame for any public role in financing care. Republicans won both chambers in 1946; the enabling bills never reached a floor vote. Truman campaigned on national health insurance again in 1948, won, and still could not move it. As the [[Red Scare]] intensified, "socialized medicine" acquired a second and heavier charge. The failure had structural consequences that outlasted the fight. With universal coverage foreclosed, employer-sponsored private insurance — an accident of wartime wage controls — hardened into the American default, and health reform narrowed permanently to covering the populations private insurers would not. Twenty years later, [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] came to Independence, Missouri to sign the [[Medicare and Medicaid Act]] in the Truman Library auditorium and read Truman's own 1945 sentences back to him from the podium — quoting the paragraph immediately preceding this one — before saying, "we are taking such action — 20 years later." He then enrolled Harry and Bess Truman as the first two Medicare beneficiaries. The plank was fulfilled for people over 65 and for the categorically poor, and left unfulfilled for everyone else. The sentence remains the cleanest available statement of the premise the American right has contested ever since: that health is a public concern, and that ability to pay is a barrier the nation has an obligation to remove rather than a price signal it should respect. ## Verification - **Primary text**: *Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Harry S. Truman, 1945*, document 192, hosted by the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum (National Archives). The wording above is verbatim from that text, including the ellipsis style in the surrounding quotations of the September 6 message. - **Corroboration**: The same message appears in the American Presidency Project's Truman collection and is reproduced in full by Physicians for a National Health Program and other secondary archives; wording is identical across them. - **The 1965 echo**: LBJ's quotation of Truman's message is preserved verbatim in the American Presidency Project transcript of the July 30, 1965 signing remarks. ## Related quotes - [[Lyndon B. Johnson - healing miracle of modern medicine]] — the 1965 signing that partially fulfilled this message. - [[Harry S. Truman - the wrong kind of tax reduction]] — the same president on who the fiscal state is built to serve. - [[Mehmet Oz - stabilizing the market]] — the 2026 inversion, framing subsidized coverage as a bailout. ## See also - [[Economic Bill of Rights]] - [[Medicare and Medicaid Act]] - [[Social Security Act]] - [[Medicare Part D]] - [[Quotes Hub]] - [[US Presidents Hub]]