Posted by Michael Wonder on 28 Mar 2017
In health bill’s defeat, Medicaid comes of age
28 March 2017 - When it was created more than a half century ago, Medicaid almost escaped notice.
Front-page stories hailed the bigger, more controversial part of the law that President Lyndon B. Johnson signed that July day in 1965 — health insurance for elderly people, or Medicare, which the American Medical Association had bitterly denounced as socialised medicine. The New York Times did not even mention Medicaid, conceived as a small program to cover poor people’s medical bills.
But over the past five decades, Medicaid has surpassed Medicare in the number of Americans it covers. It has grown gradually into a behemoth that provides for the medical needs of one in five Americans — 74 million people — starting for many in the womb, and for others, ending only when they go to their graves.
