In the 1960s the federal government of the United States added a wide range of new health programs—Medicare, Medicaid, health manpower training, occupational safety, and others—to its long-established support for biomedical research and hospital construction. Total federal health outlays rose from $5 billion in 1965 to almost $37 billion in 1975. This paper describes the legislative history of federal health programs and reports the recent trends in expenditures by functional category. The expenditures of major programs are related to the populations they serve and data are presented to document the enormous inflow of resources to medical care during the last 10 years. This inflow has been induced by the structural changes in the medical care market first set in motion by private health insurance, and accelerated by the new federal programs. Designing some way to control it is a major problem in health policy for the late 1970s.
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