The proposal was also far more modest in scope than National Health Insurance, and therefore far less costly. (Although Falk's original proposal included all categories of social security beneficiaries, the preponderance were elderly.) For some time, Social Security officials had been troubled by the fact that, as long as the social security system failed to protect against the greatest single cause of economic dependency in old age-the high cost of medical care-it could not really fulfill its basic objective. The notion of limiting health insurance to social security beneficiaries seemed, from the point of view of the administration, to have several merits. Ewing heard of the idea in early December 1950, and when the administrator expressed an interest, Falk drafted a memorandum for him. Falk (who had become head of the Bureau of Research and Statistics) and his staff had been developing such a plan de novo and memorandums on the subject had been circulating within the 'Social Securit.y Administration. It was only after the 1950 election, when Federal Security Administrator Ewing began casting about for some alternative to the moribund Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill, that health insurance for beneficiaries was reintroduced as a serious legislative proposal. (1) But Murray's idea was also buried in the files and forgotten. Murray, mentioned the idea again, probably without being aware of Dr.

In 1944 an officia1 of the Social Security Administration, MerrillG. Thomas Parran of the Public Health Service, in 1937 (see footnote No. The first person to suggest that Government health insurance be limited (at least at first) to social security beneficiaries was Dr. In fact, some of the spadework for what would ultimately come to be known as Medicare was done in the final 3 years of the Truman administration.

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Hands off medicare