LBJ was effective very effective at getting the Great Society through Congress.
In contrast, when Medicare went into the Senate in 1962 it lost 52 to 48. Only 5 Republicans supported it and 21 Democrats opposed it.
Had Kennedy lived, what would the American Welfare State have ended up being like?
I don't think you can view the 1962 defeat as a forecast of what would have happened in 1965 if JFK had lived. In between, there would have been the 1964 presidential election, and while I don't think JFK would have defeated Goldwater as overwhelmingly as LBJ did in OTL, he would still probably have won quite decisively--the final Gallup poll before JFK's death (
after his popularity had declined from its Cuban Missile Crisis highs,
after civil rights cost him support in the South) showed him with a still healthy 59-28 percent job approval rating
https://plus.google.com/u/0/1177130...5951181922493340962&oid=117713002461778944960 and leading Goldwater by sixteen points. A decisive JFK victory would pave the way for a more favorable congressional reception for Medicare and other legislation supported by the administration.
OTOH, it could be argued that JFK, even fresh from a decisive victory, would not have pressed as hard as LBJ for progressive social and economic legislation. This was what LBJ himself sometimes suggested: " Late in the day on Saturday, November 23, 1963, Walter Heller, Kennedy’s chief economic adviser, was called into the Oval Office to brief [the new president, Lyndon B.] Johnson. “Just as I was about to go out of his office and had opened the door,” Heller wrote in notes he made just after the conversation and marked HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL, “the President gently pushed it shut and drew me back in and said, ‘Now, I want to say something about all this talk that I’m a conservative who is likely to go back to the Eisenhower ways or give in to the economy bloc in Congress. It’s not so, and I want you to tell your friends—Arthur Schlesinger, [John Kenneth] Galbraith, and other liberals—that it is not so … If you looked at my record, you would know that I am a Roosevelt New Dealer. As a matter of fact, to tell the truth, John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my taste.”"
https://webcache.googleusercontent....-of-poverty/309480/+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (Of course, this may simply be a case of LBJ playing to his audience, Heller being a liberal.)