This month marks the fifty-sixth anniversary of Medicare, signed into law by president Lyndon Johnson on July 30, 1965. The effects of the program were expansive and immediate: three years after its creation, some 96 percent of those sixty-five and older had hospital insurance, up from only 54 percent in 1963.

Today, despite decades of attempts to undermine it, it remains among the most popular of all government programs —  vastly outperforming private alternatives in a huge survey recently published by the Journal of the American Medical Association. A June poll also identified high, and in some cases stratospheric, levels of support for various proposed enhancements currently being debated in Congress, including one which would lower the age of eligibility to sixty.

Predictably, even the faint prospect of Medicare expansion has sent the private insurance racket into a tizzy, with corporate astroturf groups like the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF) taking out seven figure ad buys to defeat it. The kinds of arguments deployed by PAHCF — formed in 2018 with the explicit goal of neutralizing large-scale health care reform — are by this point quite familiar.