Medicaid and Medicare at 50

Medicare at 50--moving forward.

Synopsis The Medicare program must contend with serious challenges as it enters its 50th anniversary year, including rising expenditures, a fragmented, confusing benefit structure, and inadequate financial protections for some low-income beneficiaries and high users of services. In part 2 of their report, David Blumenthal, M.D., Karen Davis, and Stuart Guterman examine these challenges and disc...

Medicare at 50--origins and evolution.

Synopsis Since 1965, Medicare has provided millions of older and disabled Americans with guaranteed access to affordable health care. The broad popularity of the program, however, belies the intensely ideological struggle that preceded its creation and that continues in the debate over its future. In the first report of a two-part series published in the New England Journal of Medicine, David B...

Medicare, Medicaid, and People With Disability

When Medicare was amended in 1973, expanding entitlement to people with disability, it played a key role in promoting independence and autonomy and enhancing health care for this population, which traditionally had been underserved. Medicare recipients with disability have been the fastest growing Medicare-entitled population, and Medicare, along with Medicaid, has had to adjust to meet the nee...

Medicare and Medicaid: The Past as Prologue

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Social Security Amendments of 1965 into law. With his signature he created Medicare and Medicaid, which became two of America's most enduring social programs. The signing ceremony took place in Independence, Missouri, in the presence of former President Harry S. Truman, as if to indicate that what President Truman and other Presidents bef...

Medicaid at 50: no longer limited to the "deserving" poor?