July 30 · This Day in America
President Lyndon Johnson does not sign the Medicare and Medicaid Act in Washington. He flies to Independence, Missouri, to the Truman Library, and signs it next to an 81-year-old Harry Truman — who, twenty years earlier, had become the first president to ask for national health insurance and had been beaten for it. Johnson hands Truman the first souvenir pen and enrolls him as Medicare's first beneficiary, card number one. "No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine," Johnson says, "no longer will illness crush and destroy the savings that they have so carefully put away." It is one of the largest expansions of the American promise since the New Deal — the idea that growing old in this country should not mean growing afraid. He went home to do it, to the man who had asked first.
Source: www.archives.gov
Also on this day · 1956
President Eisenhower signs a law making "In God We Trust" the official motto of the United States, replacing the unofficial "E pluribus unum," and ordering it onto every denomination of paper money. It was a Cold War answer to state atheism abroad — a country drawing a line about who it was. The words had ridden on coins since the Civil War; now they were the nation's, by statute.
Source: www.britannica.com
“No longer will older Americans be denied the healing miracle of modern medicine.”President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1965