Imagining Medicare: Visions of the Future

Medicare’s salience to health policy and American politics is suffi ciently obvious that it needs no explanation. Yet scholarly attention to Medicare has never matched its fi scal and political signifi cance. Medicare has long been on the margins of political science, while book-length treatments of Medicare policy have been rare. That relative obscurity, though, is about to end. To date, attention to the baby boomers’ impact on public programs has emphasized the fate of Social Security; far more books have been written on the alleged Social Security crisis than on Medicare’s future. But the high, unpredictable rate of health care spending makes Medicare a more vexing fi nancial challenge than Social Security, and we are likely to hear increasing warnings about Medicare’s fi nancing gap in coming years. In a health care system that lurches from one crisis to the next,