Milestones: 24 Years Ago In TIME

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The Medicare reform bill is the latest effort in a decades-long battle to contain MEDICAL COSTS. TIME delved into the issue during the Carter presidency, when another health-care debate raged on Capitol Hill.

Starting with Blue Cross in the 1930s ... private insurers have picked up a giant chunk of hospital-doctor bills. In 1965 Congress chipped in, providing Medicare payments for those over 65 and Medicaid assistance for the poor. There are still gaps in the coverage: the 20% or so of the bill that the typical Medicare patient must pay can be a severe burden; the long illness that exhausts inadequate insurance benefits is a terror to the middle class ... Unquestionably, this system has saved innumerable lives and improved the nation's health by encouraging people to seek medical care that they could not otherwise afford. But the system could hardly have been better designed to fan inflation than if that had been its purpose. It has in effect repealed for medicine the last vestiges of the law of supply and demand, a free market equivalent of the law of gravity, and made health care a market of weightlessness: what goes up keeps going up.

--TIME, May 28, 1979