ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the strengths and weaknesses of Medicare, a program second only to social security in elderly hearts and also in the amounts of money it collects and distributes. As Medicare goes, so in large measure go both the quality and the quantity of elderly health care; so, in smaller proportions, go the integrity of our national budget and the size of our aggregate medical bill. Few could have predicted that instead of boycotting the program, the nation's health-care professionals would embrace it in an inflationary bear hug—that they would love it nearly to death. The quest can be said to have begun auspiciously when Theodore Roosevelt's Bull Moose party called for a state-by-state system of universal health insurance. In the face of so much resistance, Congress failed to establish firm federal controls over the health-care business. The agency that is supposed to run the program is known as the Health Care Financing Administration, or Health Care Financing Administration.
