The House Ways and Means Committee had haggled for weeks over three rival schemes dealing with medical care for the aged: 1) The Administration's medicare program aimed at compulsory hospital insurance through social security; 2) a Republican alternative proposing a federally assisted voluntary protection system, covering both hospitals and doctors; and 3) "elder-care," the American Medical Association's widely publicized plan, under which federal-state funds would help pay private premiums on the basis of need, in an extension of the 1960 Kerr-Mills Act authorizing aid to the medically indigent elderly.
Then, in...