The AMA was the first group to lobby against publicly-funded healthcare (1930s-40s). See here [1] for some examples of cartoons they commissioned, playing to b

The AMA was the first group to lobby against publicly-funded healthcare (1930s-40s). See here [1] for some examples of cartoons they commissioned, playing to base emotions to sink the healthcare components of Truman's Fair Deal. There's not a lot of content on wikipedia about the details of the opposition, but here's the summary of the context of the pre-WWII years [2]. Then after WWII, Truman proposed revisiting this problem. There's a really good account of what followed here [3]. Essentially, the AMA engaged in a mass-marketing scheme to paint universal healthcare as part of a communist agenda and therefore un-American. This advertising, coupled with the ironically-government-induced rise of employer-subsidized insurance, decimated what had been broad public support for universal healthcare. So, yeah. There's a pretty proximate alternate history where we've had universal healthcare since 1947. It'd be interesting to see what that world looks like today. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935669/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3935669/ [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_in_the_United_States#1930s%E2%80%931950s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_health_care_reform_... [3]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/november-19-1945-harry-truman-calls-national-health-insurance-program https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/november-19-1945-harry-t...