When Johnson was pushing congress to establish the nation’s first real health care funding, many legislators, especially conservative southern Democrats, balked at the cost. Johnson was well aware that Medicare would be costly. But he thought health insurance was too important, in reducing poverty among elderly people, to let costs get in the way. He persuaded these legislators in his famously raconteurish way:
I’ll take care of that, I’ll do that. . . . When they asked me, do you want to put in anothe 400 or 500 million [to cover Mills’s Medicare expansion], . . . what did I say about it? . . . I said we had an old judge in Texas one time . . . we called him Al Caldy . . . old Al Caldy Roberts, and he said, when they talked to him one time that he might’ve abused the Constitution and he said, “What’s the Constitution between friends?” And I say, tell Wilbur that 400 million’s not going to separate us friends when it’s for health.