Medicare and Medicaid considerably changed the nature of health care in the United States. Growing rapidly in the next few years, they reached one-fifth of the population by 1976.38 Medicare helped a number of elderly people to receive health services that might otherwise have driven them into poverty. Medicaid enabled many eligible poor people to go to doctors for the first time in their lives. By 1968 it was estimated that low-income Americans consulted physicians more often than did higher-income people (5.6 visits per year as opposed to 4.9 visits).39 Changes such as these gladdened the
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