On this day in 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signs Medicare, a health insurance program for elderly Americans, into law. At the bill-signing ceremony, which took place at the Truman Library in Independence, Missouri, former President Harry Truman was enrolled as Medicare’s first beneficiary and received the first Medicare card.
Johnson wanted to recognize Truman, who, in 1945, had become the first president to propose national health insurance, an initiative that was opposed at the time by Congress.
The Medicare program, providing hospital and medical insurance for Americans age 65 or older, was signed into law as an amendment to the Social Security Act of 1935. Some 19 million people enrolled in Medicare when it went into effect in 1966.
In 1972, eligibility for the program was extended to Americans under 65 with certain disabilities and people of all ages with permanent kidney disease requiring dialysis or transplant. In December 2003, President George W. Bush signed into law the Medicare Modernization Act, which added outpatient prescription drug benefits to Medicare.
Medicare is funded entirely by the federal government and paid for in part through payroll taxes. Medicare is currently a source of controversy due to the strain it puts on the federal budget. Throughout its history, the program also has been plagued by fraud—committed by patients, doctors and hospitals—that has cost taxpayers billions of dollars.
Medicaid, a state and federally funded program that offers health coverage to certain low-income people, was also signed into law by President Johnson on July 30, 1965, as an amendment to the Social Security Act.
If medical procedures and care had stayed at the level of development they were at in 1965 Medicare would have remained at 1965 cost projections.
But advances in medicine -everything from high tech treatments to things like joint replacements and highly advanced diagnostics and testing using very expensive equipment- have made medical care for older people so much more expensive now than then,
It needs to be rationed so that only the right kind of people receive these advanced forms of care, the rest should remain at the 1965 levels of care to keep costs down.
NO. The COSTS of these newer technologies are as high as they are, in LARGE PART due to how much they KNOW their purchasers will receive from government and other 3rd party insurance payers in compensation. If you know someone is going to get $250 for a procedure, why would you work to keep the costs lower? If you can lobby the government to increase compensation and such a move is easier than keeping costs low, why not take the easy route? The chicken cannot be separated from the egg. One side of this equation fed the other. In every other “free market” sector of our economy, consumer price pressure has driven an increase in quality and reduction in price. The government is now the “consumer” of 50% of every dollar involved in the health care sector. If you don’t think that the disease of government doesn’t infect all that money, then you are missing the boat.