Before the Affordable Health Care Act, there was the fight over Medicaid and Medicare

Shutdown or no, the Obamacare exchanges go live today, offering insurance to the 45 million Americans who don’t currently have it. But (as we well know by now) opponents of the president’s signature law are displeased — House Republicans took the federal budget hostage, demanding that the law be repealed, defunded or delayed. And so, without a budget, the government shut down today for the first time in 17 years.

But there’s a long history of government safety net programs which are now popular encountering major opposition at their births, and even long after. For some opponents, the devil is in the details; others decry the welfare state as straight-up socialism.

Two pieces of legislation stand out. First, in 1935, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Social Security Act which created our public pension system. Then, in 1965, Lyndon Baines Johnson signed the Social Security Act Amendments which created Medicaid and Medicare. This slideshow looks at some of their outspoken critics — and the legislative roadblocks they created. It’s remarkable how similar the rhetoric is to what we hear from conservative Obamacare opponents today.

In the 1936 election, Roosevelt’s challenger, former Kansas Governor Alf Landon, supported some of the president’s New Deal policies but thought Social Security had deep structural problems that required its repeal. In particular, Landon was upset that the program was financed through a payroll tax. “This is the largest tax bill in history. And to call it ‘social security’ is a fraud on the workingman,” he said in one speech. “I am not exaggerating the folly of this legislation. The saving it forces on our workers is a cruel hoax.”

The Social Security Act also had critics on the left. In a House hearing on the Act early in 1935, the Communist Party sent a representative named C. A. Hathway to testify. “We do not believe that this bill can be amended in the interests of the workers,” Hathway said of the legislation, at the time called the Economic Security Bill and introduced in the Senate by Democrat Robert Wagner. “In our opinion, the Wagner bill is not designed to provide social security for the masses of the people. In our opinion this bill is designed, rather, to provide security for the rich who dominate the country. The aims of the sponsors of the Wagner bill, in our opinion, are, first, to quiet the masses who are today increasingly expressing their discontent with the crisis conditions that exist by offering them a sham measure that will give them in reality nothing.”

Hathway said the Communist Party instead supported more extensive legislation in the House known as the Frazier-Lundeen bill, which, among other things, mandated unemployment insurance that paid the prevailing local wage for the entire duration of unemployment, funded by a tax increase on incomes over $85,000 in today’s dollars.

In 1960, the Kerr-Mills Act passed, providing federal funds to states to cover the “medically needy.” Another piece of legislation, the King-Anderson bill, was introduced, and proposed covering some medical expenses for the elderly. The King-Anderson bill ultimately failed, but was seen as a predecessor to Medicare. In 1961, a newly-conservative Ronald Reagan — at the time still an actor — joined a PR push by the American Medical Association against “socialized medicine.” “If you don’t [write your senator in opposition to King-Anderson], this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country,” Reagan said, “until one day… we will wake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

George H.W. Bush was among those conservatives who, in 1964, joined in the push against Medicare and Medicaid. During his election campaign in 1964, he joined Goldwater’s rhetoric and pejoratively referred to the program as “socialized medicine” — a term that, though common today, carried more weight during a time when America was engaged in a Cold War against the Soviet Union and the House Un-American Activities Committee was holding hearings.