Happy 44th birthday, Medicare! The right wingers' screams of apocalypse were a sham.

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“Medicare was a comprehensive—and comprehensible—program, available throughout the country and with a core set of benefits,” says Judith Stein, director of the Center for Medicare Advocacy.

In other words, it delivers the opposite of what the private insurance industry has been providing. And it is doing so with a better track record of controlling costs. Beginning in 1997, the growth in Medicare’s cost per beneficiary has been slower than the cost escalation in coverage delivered by private insurers. Between 2002 and 2006, for example, Medicare’s cost per beneficiary rose 5.4 percent, while per capita costs in private insurance rose 7.7 percent, according to MedPAC, an independent agency charged with advising Congress on Medicare issues.

So why would Congress create a new health insurance system that doesn’t have a Medicare-like public plan for consumers to purchase?

Because conservatives, Democrats among them, never let the facts get in the way of their ideology. The Senate, in particular, seems intent on creating a new private health insurance “cooperative” that has never been tested, has no track record of delivering quality coverage at an affordable price, and which consumers would have to learn to navigate.

Forty-four years ago, on July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the law creating Medicare. In its way, Medicare was a testament to our failure to create a national health insurance system that would cover everyone. With former President Harry Truman looking on, Johnson said the need was great, and urgent. “There are more than 18 million Americans over the age of 65. Most of them have low incomes. Most of them are threatened by illness and medical expenses that they cannot afford.”

At the time, about half of the elderly had no health insurance—they were too old and too likely to get sick, so the private market simply wouldn’t insure them. The elderly were the demographic group most likely to live in poverty, and about one in three older Americans were poor. Blacks and other minorities could not receive treatment in whites-only medical facilities, discrimination that was barred by Medicare.

Now the elderly are among the best-insured Americans, with upward of 95 percent covered by Medicare. The rate of poverty among those 65 and older is under 10 percent. The decline in elderly poverty began with the creation of Social Security—but it accelerated, according to Census Bureau data, only after Medicare coverage began.

“The need for this action is plain,” Johnson said in signing the law in Truman’s hometown of Independence, Mo. “And it is so clear indeed that we marvel not simply at the passage of this bill, but what we marvel at is that it took so many years to pass it.”

Now we marvel again at the long and contentious legislative path that health care revision is taking. We hear the same arguments against a national health insurance plan that were made nearly half a century ago.

But now we have Medicare, and its demonstrated history of delivering exactly what Johnson said it would. And the marvel of our own time is that we ignore this success, while promoting untried alternatives that may well fail.