The Streets Were Paved with Gold - Ken Auletta [40]
Oliver’s report reveals just how “inexperienced” the Lindsay team was. He learned that the three members of the Transit Authority never participated in the $500 bonus decision. “They tried to get this benefit from us for years,” complained John H. Gilhooley, one of the members. “We said ridiculous. You’d break the bank. We said no, no, no. But then these wise guys got into the negotiations.… Mastermind Price [Deputy Mayor Robert Price] left us out entirely and during the course of the evening gave away the store. Price gave it away. And when they came out of the room one of the labor guys came over to me and said, ‘Geez, you know what happened?’ I said no, what happened? He said, ‘We got the $500 pensions.’ I said, go on, you’re kidding. ‘No, no kidding,’ he said. When we raised it, Price said, ‘What’s wrong with that?’… Price’s exact words were: ‘I’m for pensions.’ After that, it was on the table and it couldn’t be taken off. It was that kind of naivete and stupidity that contributed to the whole bungle.… This naive jerk walked in and tried to settle it. Once in, he increased the total cost of the package by 54%. This was the focal point of the problem New York faces today with the talk of the 50-cent fare.”
When Oliver talked to him in 1971, investment banker Price declared, “I can’t believe that, but if I did it, I did it. If they say I did it. I’m amazed that I had such authority. I was not experienced. Where was the Mayor?”
The Mayor could have been in a helicopter. Which is where he was on January 3, 1966, bringing tragic reports to a beleaguered city. “I’m over the Queensborough Bridge and it looks good,” the dashing Mayor announced. “Traffic is moving easily.” Standing on a nearby roof, the city traffic commissioner gently corrected his boss. The Mayor was viewing the wrong bridge. Traffic on the Williamsburg was moving easily. The Queensborough, several miles uptown, was backed up.
Medicaid
Nelson Rockefeller was seeking reelection in 1966. His TV commercials featured animated fish talking to each other about the clean water their governor had made possible. Polls were showing that his Irish-Catholic opponent, Frank O’Connor, was weak among Jewish and progressive voters, so Rockefeller donned his “liberal” mask. He hugged, kissed, poked and winked his charming way through an International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers union meeting in Queens. There, with a well-publicized stroke of his pen, on April 30, 1966, he dramatically signed a state Medicaid bill into law, hailing it as “the most significant social legislation in three decades.”
For poor and moderate-income people, Medicaid provided a range of free medicine not envisioned in the original federal legislation. Most New York politicians tried to steal the credit. Senator Robert Kennedy applauded the bill, as did labor leaders, newspaper editorials, Republicans, Democrats, Liberals—and both houses of the state legislature, which passed it. One of the few progressives to oppose the bill was Howard Samuels, then mounting one of his four unsuccessful quests for the governorship. Samuels warned that the true cost could be $2 billion, a sum easily calculated by multiplying those eligible by the average annual medical costs. He also cautioned that free medicine was not provided by money alone, and that a management plan and more doctors, more nurses, more beds, more hospitals, more auditors, would be needed as well. Without providing these, the state was promising “free” medicine without the means to deliver on that promise.
Inflated costs were one result; too many people chasing too few doctors and facilities made medical care prohibitively expensive.