Description:The Politics of Medicare is both a detailed account of how American came to have government health insurance for the elderly in the mid-1960s and a commentary on how the American political system dealt with deeply divisive social issues in the postwar period. For this second edition, Marmor has updated this earlier history, recounted with explicit analytical focus, and added a retrospective account of the operation of the program in the context of a far larger constituency of elderly patients and soaring costs of treatment.