LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) -- Getting health-care reform passed was only half the battle, and if President Barack Obama wants to keep his achievement alive, he could learn from a political master: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
About a month after LBJ signed Medicare into law in July 1965, the nation's then-chief executive pulled a fast one on the American Medical Association that helped him make Medicare a success.
The wily president, who proved adept at twisting arms to push the landmark bill providing medical aid for seniors through Congress, now had to do the same with the nation's doctors in order to get the reluctant bunch on board, says Joseph Califano, Johnson's senior domestic policy aide at the time. The public was still wary of Medicare and its implications, and doctors were the chief skeptics among them.
