ABSTRACT
Legislative liaison officials within the Department of Health, Education and Welfare counted only 196 House members certain to vote for Medicare in 1961—23 votes short of a simple majority. Kennedy's Democratic majority in the Congress presaged no clear majority favorable to Medicare, and only a majority vote of the entire House could extract the bill from a hostile Ways and Means Committee. Between the defeat of President Kennedy's initial Medicare proposal in 1961 and the national elections of 1964, none of the major congressional obstacles to its enactment were fully removed. The American Medical Association simultaneously launched less publicized efforts to mobilize local communities against the Kennedy-supported bill. The circumstances of Medicare's defeat in the fall of 1964 illustrated how substantially the possibilities of enactment had increased since the first Kennedy effort in 1961.
