King-Anderson Medicare Bill Defeated in Committee After Intense Corporate Lobbying

The King-Anderson bill, President Kennedy’s Medicare proposal introduced by Representative Cecil King and Senator Clinton Anderson, is defeated in committee despite strong public support after intense lobbying by the American Medical Association, corporate healthcare interests, and conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats. The bill would have covered hospital and nursing home expenses for Social Security and disability recipients but faced powerful opposition from House Ways and Means chairman Wilbur Mills, who feared undermining the recently enacted Kerr-Mills Act and jeopardizing Social Security’s fiscal viability, and Senate Finance Committee chairman Harry Byrd of Virginia. The AMA’s uncompromising opposition includes its Operation Coffee Cup campaign featuring Ronald Reagan recordings warning against “socialized medicine,” inundating Congress with letters and successfully blocking the legislation. Though the Ways and Means committee holds hearings, it never votes on King-Anderson, and the Senate defeat is narrow (12-11), signaling shifting attitudes. The bill’s defeat demonstrates effective corporate lobbying infrastructure mobilizing against Great Society social programs, with the healthcare industry successfully blocking Medicare for years through coordinated opposition. This 1962 defeat precedes the Powell Memo by 9 years but shows business interests already possessed sophisticated lobbying capacity to defeat progressive legislation, contradicting Powell’s 1971 claim that business lacked political organization. The corporate opposition to Medicare represents the pre-Powell lobbying infrastructure that successfully blocked social welfare expansion throughout the 1960s before Johnson’s 1964 landslide finally broke the conservative coalition’s power, leading to Medicare’s passage in 1965.