Grading PolitiFact: Obama invokes Teddy Roosevelt on health care reform (Updated)

PolitiFact writer Alexander Lane evaluated a reference from President Barack Obama to past Republican president Theodore Roosevelt. It will take some probing to pin down what claim Lane thinks he's evaluating.

Here is the article title:

"Teddy Roosevelt first called for (health care) reform nearly a century ago."

The title offers us two potential areas of focus. Did Roosevelt "first" call for health care reform nearly a century ago? And was it the first time Roosevelt called for such reform or was he the first to call for it? Or did Roosevelt merely call for health care reform nearly a century ago, without so much emphasis on "first"?

The statement in context:

The problems we face today are a direct consequence of actions that we failed to take yesterday. Since Teddy Roosevelt first called for reform nearly a century ago, we have talked and we have tinkered. We have tried and fallen short, we've stalled for time, and again we have failed to act because of Washington politics or industry lobbying.
(Whitehouse.gov)

Does it even matter what type of reform Roosevelt envisioned? We check back with Lane:

Not content to emulate Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, Republican icons for whom President Obama has expressed admiration in the past, Obama has aligned himself with a third GOP hero on the issue of health care.

For Lane, the issue seems to be how Obama and Roosevelt align on health care. That is not how I would have initially approached Obama's statement. As such it says nothing about consonance between the views of the two men respecting health care. Roosevelt's failed attempt to recapture the presidency was through his alignment with a "Progressive Party" that was a faction of the Republican Party. So T. Roosevelt probably counts as the first major candidate to have health care reform included as part of his political platform, even if his speeches from around that time provide no evidence for it according to the results of my limited survey.

Back to Lane:

We wondered whether Roosevelt really proposed reform on the scale of the near-universal health care Obama advocates, or if the new president was pushing the whole bipartisan-appeal thing a bit far.

Aside from the presumptive fundamental accuracy of seeing Roosevelt as the first prominent political voice to advocate health care reform, Lane perhaps has a legitimate point of inquiry, here. Given Obama's past invocation of revered Republican figures, he may have subtly intended for his reference to Roosevelt to burnish whatever health care reform he would propose. The text of Obama's speech provides relatively little purchase for that notion, but let's at least see where Lane goes with the idea.

Lane reviews the relevant provisions in the Progressive Party platform. I'll reproduce only they key paragraph here, but encourage examination of the context using the link provided.

The protection of home life against the hazards of sickness, irregular employment and old age through the adoption of a system of social insurance adapted to American use;

At first blush, the above seems like a thin foundation on which to build the picture of Teddy Roosevelt as an advocate of health care reform. On the contrary, this provision of the platform looks like it is intended to provide support for a family experiencing economic difficulty owing to sickness, not as a provision for the payment of health care benefits ("The protection of home life" being the key phrase).

Lane found two experts willing to say that Roosevelt was talking about health care benefits, apparently. W. M. Brands was one:

"What this envisioned was pretty much what FDR accomplished with Social Security, but with health insurance added," said Brand (sic), author of TR: The Last Romantic (1998).

Kathleen Dalton, a big liberal, was the other:

"We don’t know the specifics of the plan," said Dalton, author of Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (2002). "The roots were probably British, though he knew about German health insurance."

Dalton said unequivocally Obama was on solid ground evoking Roosevelt.

British roots, eh?

In 1911 there was one more piece of social legislation, and a very important one: the National Insurance Act. The general plan had been outlined by the Government in 1909. This act provided for insurance against sickness and disability for workers between the ages of sixteen and seventy, under formal contract of service, whose annual incomes were £160 or less, and for nearly all manual workers regardless of income. It was a contributory scheme (the chief variation from German practice which served as something of a model), with the employer to contribute threepence per week, the employee fourpence (female, threepence), and the government twopence. The most important benefits were ten shillings a week for sickness and five shillings a week for disability.
(Havighurst, "Britain in Transition," 1985, p. 104)

By the measure of the British system described above, Theodore Roosevelt would seem to have found The New Deal more than adequate to fulfil his vision of social insurance.

The Social Security Act did not quite achieve all the aspirations its supporters had hoped by way of providing a "comprehensive package of protection" against the "hazards and vicissitudes of life." Certain features of that package, notably disability coverage and medical benefits, would have to await future developments. But it did provide a wide range of programs to meet the nation's needs. In addition to the program we know think of as Social Security, it included unemployment insurance, old-age assistance, aid to dependent children and grants to the states to provide various forms of medical care.
(socialsecurity.gov)

If we ignore the impact of the state grants, we see that Brands' distinction between Social Security and the Progressive Party's plan was probably explained by the latter's practice of providing payments during periods of illness. While that is a common feature of modern health insurance, it is not the way we think of health care reform. We think about medical services.

Brands was good to draw attention to the distinction, and the author Lane earns credit by including the quotation:

Brands more or less agreed, though he cautioned that health care was "not the priority that trust-busting or conservation was" for Roosevelt. "It's worth remembering that health care was a far smaller concern in those days," Brands said. "Doctors had few medicines, and most people died or got better on their own. The biggest issues were public health — eradicating malaria, cleaning up water supplies, and so on."

After a couple of historical tidbits, Lane gives the conclusion:

Clearly, Obama is on solid ground tracing the push for national health care back to Theodore Roosevelt. We find this claim to be True.

Lane put himself in the position of defending a minor argument loosely implicit in Obama's statement.

Contrary to Lane's conclusion, it is ridiculous to trace the push for national health care as we understand it today back to Theodore Roosevelt. To whatever extent Obama attempted to convey that impression, he misled.

It seems that Lane took information that would have supported the plain meaning of Obama's statement--that Theodore Roosevelt had been the first major political figure in the U.S. to call for "(health care)" reform and wrongly turned it into support for the far more dubious proposition Lane identified.

The grade: D-

Editor Bill Adair shares this grade.


Update:

Commenter "ildi" stopped by to give me a heads up about a "Marketplace" radio story called "A history lesson in health care reform."  Marketplace provides business news which typically airs on public radio stations (the NPRish style is evident from the audio clips).

The idea, I suppose, was intended to inform me of readily available evidence of Roosevelt's direct support for a social medicine program.  But that's not what I found when I looked into the story:

So this is a story I heard from a doctor that I met one time.

Warner: Can you introduce yourself to me?

Dubin: I'm William Dubin, I'm professor and interim chair at Temple University School of Medicine, Department of Psychiatry.

Bill Dubin is not only a psychiatrist, but an amateur historian, he's got a book in his lap...

Dubin: Called "The Transformation of American Medicine" by Paul Starr.

...Which is where he read the following story.

  At least PolitiFact contacted professional historians rather referencing "a story I heard froma  doctor that I met one time."  And can it be too much trouble to accurately provide the name of Paul Starr's book?  I noticed a discrepancy between the print and audio right away.

But back to the evidence of Roosevelt's support for a medical benefit:

And Roosevelt came out 100 percent behind compulsory health care insurance. And his actual quote was "No country can be strong if its people are sick and poor."

Archival tape of Teddy Roosevelt's speech

Of course, Roosevelt lost the election.

The source of the quotation in this story isn't clear, oddly enough.  The archival tape doesn't match the quotation.   The portion I quoted is not attributed to Dr. Dubin.  The narrator (Gregory Warner) apparently heard something from Dubin that made him think the Roosevelt had made the statement.  But it may have originated from Paul Starr's characterization of the reason for Roosevelt's support of a health benefit (yellow highlights added):

In the end, we have no solid lead in this story.  We'd be taking Gregory Warner's word on it.

Perhaps more interesting than the dubious attempt to fill in the missing Roosevelt factoid, the story references a health care proposal written up after Roosevelt lost his Progressive Party bid for the presidency.

I may follow up on that one at a later time.


March 21, 2009: Deleted a redundant "the."
Nov. 11, 2009: Added missing "l" to "health."