30 Issues | A Quick and Helpful History of Health Insurance in America

If you want a brief history of presidents, campaigns, and the health insurance debate, listen to the first 10 minutes or so of the segment above. You'll hear Lyndon B. Johnson signing medicare into law in 1965, Bill Clinton asking for Congress' support in fixing a broken healthcare system in 1993, and Obama signing the ACA.

Thanks @BrianLehrer for that great clip of Ted Kennedy talking about healthcare in '78. I remember it well. pic.twitter.com/bfNV7G2eEV

— Liz Ritter (@LizRittr) April 28, 2016

Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation and co-executive director of their Program for the Study of Health Reform and Private Insurance, reviews the history of health care reform in the U.S. and today's debate on repealing or improving Obamacare or instituting a single-payer plan.

Here's what Levitt said about the American system, compared to other countries:

"We are absolutely an outlier on healthcare. We spend more. We get less. And we cover fewer people than any other major industrialized country. And I think it is our fear of government involvement in healthcare, which is a legitimate debate. But there are consequences to having less government involved. It means we pay much more for drugs, for example, than other countries do."