Slow Expansion of Coverage, Altman Part 2-3

With the start of part two in the book "Power, Politics, and Universal Health Care", by Altman begins with chapter four. Chapter four focuses on free hospital care for the poor. While talking about logistics, Altman talks about many great political figure heads and leaders that had sort of a tug of war when concerning adequate hospital facilities and free hospital health care. The most prominent thing that was discussed in chapter four was the Hill-Burton Program, which gave power to the states to help make their hospitals well equipped. Chapter five is when he book starts getting into the details of Medicare and the controversies that it brought along, politically and socially. 1958 was the year when health care hearings for the elderly started to be heard in Congress. Throughout chapter six and seven, Altman focuses on Medicare and is rather repetitive because not a lot of progress was made, but he includes a lot of stories and advances that were made in the political sphere. Chapter eight goes into detail about Medicare still, but mainly on the prescription drug benefit. George W. Bush pushed for this concept for the first two years of his administration, which was viewed as strange because he was a conservative Republican. Part three mainly focusses on costs, which in my mind when anybody ever says health care my first thought is money. I feel like most other people I associate with at least associate cost and money with health care before they consider anything else. Part two and three of this book talk about politics mainly concerning issues and the advances they made with certain issues, which I find interesting but its rather tedious to remember and write about specifically.