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 pres-ence of former President Harry S. Truman, as if to indicate that what President Truman and other Presidents before him had tried to get done had now been accomplished. Yet, for all of the appearance of continuity, the law that President Johnson approved differed in significant ways from the law that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would have passed in the thirties or President Truman would have signed in the forties.