The Politics of Medicare and Medicaid, 50 Years Later

As Princeton historian Julian Zelizer has pointed out in The New Yorker: "We have a tendency to forget the history of laws that extended the obligations and commitments of the federal government. But the passage of Medicare and Medicaid, which shattered the barriers that had separated the federal government and the health-care system, was no less contentious than the recent debates about the Affordable Care Act," also known as Obamacare.