Medicaid: It Slipped into the Health Care System with Hardly Any Notice
It’s the largest health plan in the country and it will enroll more than half of the newly insured under the newly enacted health reform act. However, the New York Times didn’t even mention Medicaid an any article in 1965 and Medicaid was mentioned in less than a third as often as Medicare the following year. For comparison, note the media coverage of Social Security after it was enacted.
Chart source: Laura Katz Olson (2010), The Politics of Medicaid, Columbia University Press, New York, 426 pages.
HT to Jason Shafrin of the Healthcare Economist blog.
Maybe the explanation is that Medicaid-eligible people (are) were less apt to read the New York Times than Social Security and Medicare-age people. I’ve always heard that Medicaid was thrown into as an afterthought.
Interesting. The largest insurance plan in the country slipped in almost unnoticed.
Too bad people didn’t pay more attention to it before it became the monster it is.