As it happened, the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965 represented the only major governmental changes in the American health care system during the next three decades. Americans continued to live with a medical system that led the world in its training of physicians and in technological wizardry but that was also bureaucratically complicated and far from comprehensive. This was not the intention of Johnson and fellow liberals, who did well to secure legislation that reformers had been seeking for years. In 1965 they probably accomplished all that was politically possible.
