When Martin Luther King failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia, the civil-rights struggle in America reached its low point. King became bankrupt almost, as a leader. Plus, even financially, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was in financial trouble; plus it was in trouble, period, with the people when they failed to desegregate Albany, Georgia. Other Negro civil-rights leaders of so-called national stature became fallen idols. As they became fallen idols, began to lose their prestige and influence, local Negro leaders began to stir up the masses. In Cambridge, Maryland, Gloria Richardson; in Danville, Virginia, and other parts of the country, local leaders began to stir up our people at the grassroots level. This was never done by these Negroes, whom you recognize, of national stature. They controlled you, but they never incited you or excited you. They controlled you; they contained you; they kept you on the plantation.
National health reform campaigns in the 20th century were initiated and run by elites more concerned with defending against attacks from interest groups than with popular mobilization, and grassroots reformers in the labor, civil rights, feminist, and AIDS activist movements have concentrated more on immediate and incremental changes than on transforming the health care system itself.
Grassroots With Readings 10th Edition With Answersl
Yet no movement of comparable size or intensity has arisen in the United States to demand universal health care. Labor unions, senior citizens, socialists, and other groups have certainly participated in campaigns to redesign the health care system, but the campaigns themselves have most often been initiated and run by elite organizations and individuals with little connection to a popular base of support. Public opinion has generally run in favor of health care reform, but popular approval has not been matched by the rise of a large-scale, activist popular movement for change.2 Because of the importance of grassroots movements to reform in the United States, it is important to ask why there has never been such a movement for universal health care, and whether and how one may emerge now and in the future.
But New Deal health reformers remained out of touch with the grassroots. In the 1930s, some CCMC leaders became political insiders as they joined the committees charged by President Franklin D. Roosevelt with creating proposals for health care to add to the Social Security Act (the Committee on Economic Security and the Technical Committee on Medical Care). These New Deal committees worked mostly in secret, isolated from public input and debate. Their members were constantly on alert for attacks from the medical profession and business, and this caution led to less-than-sweeping proposals for health reform; both committees recommended federal subsidies to states rather than a national system. But even these reforms raised the ire of physicians, and Roosevelt so feared attacks by the AMA that he dropped health coverage from his New Deal agenda.8 Because New Deal insiders did little to win grassroots participation and support, their cautious and technical proposals for health care restructuring failed to capture the imaginations of ordinary Americans. And without pressure from a strong social movement on behalf of medical insurance, Roosevelt bowed to the AMA rather than to health reformers.
The CNHI reached out to an impressive number of civil rights and antipoverty groups, but still relied on professional staff, conferences, and Washington-based lobbying, not on grassroots activism. Comprehensive reform was again weakened by interest-group squabbles; the CNHI bill competed with 13 other health insurance proposals, including ones sponsored by the AMA and commercial insurance companies, and reform lost momentum when the massive health care inflation of the 1970s led to an emphasis on cost control rather than on expanding coverage.16 But as the number of uninsured began to rise in the 1980s, public discontent intensified. In 1992, when Bill Clinton rode into the White House on a wave of popular support for major changes in the health care system, the potential for mass mobilization around universal coverage had never seemed greater.
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