ABSTRACT
Twentieth-century developments have fully borne out this prediction that the health industry would have much to offer the consumers of its services. Demands in America for government involvement in health insurance date back to the first decade of the twentieth century. The Truman solution to the problem of unequal accessibility to health services was to remove the financial barriers to care through government action. An orphan of the New Deal, government medical care insurance was to become one of the most prominent aspirations of Harry Truman's "Fair Deal." The selection of the aged as the problem group is comprehensible in the context of American politics, however distinctive it appears in comparative perspective. The use of social security funding was an obvious effort to tap the widespread legitimacy that Old Age and Survivors Insurance system programs enjoyed among all classes of Americans.
