Author: Lane Brafford

On July 30, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act Amendments into law creating Medicare and Medicaid. The signing ceremony featured former President Harry Truman being enrolled as Medicare’s first beneficiary, proudly receiving the first Medicare Card. This symbolic gesture honored Truman for proposing national health insurance in 1945, ten years after the Social Security Act was first passed. The idea of public health insurance was not the brainchild of Truman, it had been proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt as part of the Social Security Act of 1935. The innovation never made it into the final bill because…