The oldest of my grandparents turned 59 four days before I was born.

He was not far from retirement age – and that was a big problem.

Because, in 1954, most Americans got their health insurance through the Blue Cross and Blue Shield organizations that worked with employers. Otherwise, you paid private insurance companies for care.

Insurance being what it is, based on risk, the premiums for elderly Americans were higher – at a time in life when their income was reduced to what they got in a pension or through Social Security (imagine how horrible it must have been before Social Security!).

A few years before I was born, President Harry Truman proposed legislation to let the government provide health care insurance to those older than 65. It went nowhere – especially in the post-war period when people thought anything that resembled socialism was a step down the path to communism. 

But when President Lyndon Johnson won a landslide in 1964 and brought an overwhelmingly Democratic Congress into office with him, support for Medicare soared. Legislation tying Medicare to Social Security was signed into law in 1965, with Johnson giving the first Medicare cards to Truman and his wife.

Medicare – and the companion Medicaid for those who need help with financial matters – didn’t solve every health care problem for the elderly. Eligible people need to buy a plan to cover the costs Medicare doesn’t. But it was a vast improvement over what existed before – and why ending or privatizing Medicare is a political third rail.

The same thing is happening to the health care coverage mandated by the Affordable Care Act – a.k.a. Obamacare. As its opponents feared, Americans becoming more dependent on getting care for a lot less – or getting care at all when insurers want to deny coverage because of risk – are more supportive of the act.

I imagine my parents and grandparents would be shocked to know that, yes, I’m on Medicare. They’d also be relieved.