How doctors helped tank universal health care

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 June 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

A debate has been raging over universal health care in the U.S. since the 1940s. Back then, a formidable opponent emerged to dump a lot of money into ensuring it wouldn't happen. That opponent was doctors. Today on the show, Sally Helm, a Planet Money reporter, comes to us in her capacity as the host of HISTORY This Week to detail how doctors helped tank single pay healthcare back then and the role communism played in the fight.

A longer version of this episode is available at HISTORY This Week from the History Channel.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR. Healthcare.
0:12.6	Healthcare.
0:13.8	Adrian, pretty much everyone agrees.
0:15.6	It's not going well.
0:16.8	U.S. healthcare outcomes often rank near the bottom.
0:19.9	And, of course, there have been a lot of attempts to fix this,
0:22.8	a lot of politicians proposing to overhaul the system.
0:26.7	We should emulate what goes on around the rest of the world
0:29.2	and guarantee health care to all people.
0:31.3	And there have also been a lot of criticisms of those attempts.
0:34.9	Congressional Democrats embrace Crazy Bernie's socialist health care takeover.
0:39.5	That particular rhetoric, basically calling these health care plans socialism,
0:44.8	it really takes off at a particular historical moment back in the 1940s.
0:49.8	That's right. This is the indicator from Planet Money.
0:52.6	I'm Adrian Ma. And we today includes a friend of the show, Sally Helm.
0:57.5	Hello, Adrian. I am very glad to be here. Today on the show, we speak with a doctor and economist who's researched this history about how doctors actually help tank single-payer health care in the 1940s.
1:09.4	And the role communism played in the fight.
1:13.8	In the fall of 1944, California Governor Earl Warren comes down with a kidney infection.
1:19.3	He's hospitalized, and while he's recuperating, he starts reflecting on just how much this
1:24.4	treatment cost, and it cost a lot.
1:28.1	Marcella Alshan is an economist at Harvard and a physician herself.
1:32.2	She has a working paper on this.
	...

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