President Harry Truman had called for such a plan twenty years earlier. Johnson presented Truman and his wife, Bess, with Medicare cards numbers one and two.
" Well, I could do wi't, if so be ye want to get rid on't, " said the disinterested cousin, walking quickly away with the bundle, lest Chad's Bess should change her mind.
Those who stayed at home were chiefly mothers, like Timothy's Bess, who stood at her own door nursing her baby and feeling as women feel in that position—that nothing else can be expected of them.