Health Care For All history

By 1990, NHE accounted for 12.1 percent of GDP — the largest increase thus far in the history of healthcare.

Bill Clinton campaigned for president on a platform that included health care reform in 1992.

Shortly after President Clinton was inaugurated in January of 1993, he established a healthcare task force led by first lady Hillary Clinton.

In 1996, Clinton signed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which established privacy standards for individuals.

The Balanced Budget Act in 1997 slowed the growth of Medicare spending and created a new insurance structure, Medicare Advantage.

In 2003 Representative John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) first introduced the United States National Health Insurance Act, which called for a single-payer health care system, but the bill received neither a debate nor a vote on the House floor.

The price and importance of pharmaceutical drugs had increased sharply over the decades since Medicare's original passage, and by 2004 the average Medicare beneficiary was spending over $1,000 out-of-pocket each year on prescription drugs.

While the federal government took little action toward achieving universal health care, state legislators experienced success at expanding health coverage in Massachusetts in 2006.

In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned on health care reform in his bid for president, drawing heavily on the Massachusetts model.

By 2009, 5 million children were enrolled in the program, while 7.5 million children remained uninsured.

The 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as "Obamacare," introduced experimentation and uncertainty into the industry, which has been and will be watched closely over the next several years to gauge the lasting effects of its policies.

KFF. Retrieved from https://www.kff.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/5-02-13-history-of-health-reform.pdf.

In 2012, 91 percent of doctors accepted new Medicare patients, while 71 percent accepted new Medicaid patients.

The first open enrollment season for the Marketplace started in October 2013, and it was rocky, to say the least.

But by 2014, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that Medicare Part D spending had proved lower than either estimate.

By 2015, about 15 million Medicare beneficiaries—30 percent of all Medicare beneficiaries—were enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans.

McDermott reintroduced the bill at each session of Congress until choosing not to seek reelection in 2016.

Like McDermott, Conyers continued to introduce the bill at every subsequent session of Congress until he resigned from office in 2017.

In July 2018 more than seventy Democratic members of the House of Representatives formed the Medicare for All Caucus to sponsor briefings on health care reform.

Eliminating the penalty immediately caused insurance premiums to rise, even though the elimination of the penalty didn't go into effect until January of 2019.

As health care continues to be a major concern for US voters, universal health care has become a subject of debate leading up to the 2020 presidential election with several candidates for the Democratic nomination including universal health care as part of their platforms.