Honorable Robert M. Ball

(1914-2008)

Ball was commissioner of Social Security under three presidents. He joined Social Security four years after FDR created the program in 1935, then ran it from 1962 to 1973. He was a chief architect of Medicare and administered it for its first seven years. He oversaw the increase of Social Security benefits, including automatic cost-of-living adjustments, and drafted the Kennedy-Mills bill, which proposed universal health insurance in the U.S.