From FDR to Obama, a Fight for Health Care

As Congress takes on President Obama's call for overhauling health care, the desire for change will be tested _ by the expense, by politics, by resistance from doctors and private insurers, and by the general fear by some of"socialized medicine." The terms of the debate are as old as the debate itself.

Since Franklin Roosevelt considered national health care in the 1930s, virtually every president has sought to expand or universalize medical coverage. Public support has been as consistent as the countering arguments: It costs too much, it doesn't have the votes, it will ruin the free market system.

Presidents sympathetic to health care for all, from Roosevelt and Harry Truman to John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, have either failed to get it passed, or never even tried. Meanwhile, presidents otherwise deeply suspicious of government programs _ Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, the second President Bush _ have successfully backed expansion.

The political history of health care in the United States, the only developed country without universal care, is equally simple and unpredictable.

"For people who know the boring details of health care, the debate is really deja vu all over again, although I'm not sure the general public picks up on all the echoes from previous debates," says James A. Morone, co-author of"The Heart of Power," a newly released history of health care and the presidency.