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It's a holiday weekend, happy 4th of July, I guess.

To celebrate America today, the panel is going to consider the history of one of the most

popular social welfare programs of the 20th century.

We are talking, of course, about the shit show that is

Medicare. Yeah. It's a barbecue in which we will roast different elements of Medicare.

I mean, yeah, I think it's really important to look into the actual history of this and kind of what some of the,

I mean, what some of the compromises in it are that were

baked in from the get go right right um and kind of why they've had these almost like

tragic comic cascading effects in the time period after and like including into today

i kind of think of this topic as Medicare first

as farce and then as tragedy. Yeah, I always sort of, I think about it as like in the classic

Greek tragedy set up, you know, you've got your hubris, you've got your like the second part,

you're like ruin, follow your delusion, then you have your like nemesis right at the end, right? And I always

feel like the way that I first like learned the history was in this very hubristic like way that

we had these like legislative 12-dimensional chess players and just the, you know, the legislative

genius of doing this and, you know, this is like very, very crafty, like, political success.

But I think the, like, when you back up and look at the whole frame of, like, what was happening, you see everything that was left on the table.

You see what was included in ways that, like, divided the future coalitions for reform.

So taking a sort of Greek tragedy perspective, I think might actually be useful here.

Yeah.

And I think one of the reasons we wanted to talk about this today in particular is because

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