Medicare Vs Medicaid

In 1945, President Truman attempted to convince Congress that the United States needed to establish a national health insurance coverage plan because of his believes that there should be “health security for all, regardless of residence, station, or race everywhere in the United States’. Unfortunately Truman’s attempts to establish a national health insurance plan were initially unsuccessful, which is why nearly twenty years later on July 30th, 1965 President Johnson had Truman join him at Truman’s Presidential Library in Missouri. This was because on this day, title 18 and title 19 were added to the Social Security Act, thus establishing Medicare and Medicaid as national health insurance plans. Over the course of the next 51 years since
Unlike Medicaid, Medicare only saw one expansion in its’ eligibility in 1972, whereas Medicaid actually experienced several eligibility based changes over the course of several years. Starting in 1972, Medicare went from only covering elderly individuals over the age of 65 to also covering “people under the age of 65 who (received) social security disability payments for at least 24 months”5 as well as people with “end-stage renal disease who require maintenance dialysis or a kidney transplant. 4 Then as I mentioned earlier, Medicaid does experience several changed in eligibility from the time it is established in 1965 until present day. A few of these changes included acts such as the addition like The Deficit Reduction Act of 1984, which allowed for the coverage of first time pregnant women as well as pregnant women, who lived in a home where both parents were unemployed under Medicaid. In addition to other acts like the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1985 being created, which expanded the coverage of pregnant women again to cover all remaining medical expenses of pregnant women, who were AFDC Eligible. Then even though these program were enacted at various different times they were still able to help achieve both program’s initial goals of improving lives of low income
Despite the Medicare Catastrophic Act in 1988 and the critics, who did not support “Secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and welfare experimenting with alternative methods” of reimbursing physicians for Medicare and Medicaid visits, the programs have remained fairly successful. 6 Both programs were able to service intentionally positive changes based on the widening of the range of people who are eligible for their program, new acts that helped increase preventive care, and the addition of different acts like the Medicare Prospective Payment act that helped stabilize the amount of money these individuals paid depending on their plans, yet despite it all, they still supported the work Truman attempted to start twenty years