Fifty years after Medicare and Medicaid were created, healthcare in America is still rapidly evolving. Carefully observing where we’ve been will help inform where we are going, so in today’s special issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Kaiser Family Foundation President and CEO Drew Altman and I look at the Perspectives of Beneficiaries, Health Care Professionals and Institutions, and Policy Makers over the past half decade. The full text of the JAMA article is available by subscription only, but Drew and I also discussed the piece and our findings with Dr. Preeti Malani, Associate Editor, The JAMA Network in a freely available podcast.