Medicine: The Mess in Medicaid

Medicaid and Medicare. Few words relating to America's health have been mouthed so often since Congress wrote them into law in 1965. Yet few Americans understand them. As a consequence, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare has printed 550,000 copies of a deliberately cute, three-color booklet entitled MEDICAID—MEDICARE—Which Is Which? Medicare, it points out, is a federal program and is the same all over the U.S. Medicaid, on the other hand, is a federal-state partnership under which states design their own programs. How widely these vary and how grave are their defects...