[In 1960, to pacify proponents of a Medicare system, Mills and Sen. Robert Kerr, D-Okla., had ushered through Congress the so-called Kerr-Mills bill to help low-income seniors with health care costs. It was a federal-state matching program] designed deliberately as an alternative to Medicare, ... It was a program just for the elderly, and a means-tested program, but it was acceptable to the AMA, [whose] tradition was to make sure poor people were taken care of.
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