Trump’s ‘unconscionable cuts’ to Medicaid and Medicare were decades in the making

Republicans enacted the largest cuts to healthcare in US history, and fulfilled decades of conservative rhetoric

The US's largest public health insurance programs, Medicare and Medicaid, turn 60 years old on Wednesday - a birthday that will be celebrated only weeks after Republicans enacted the largest cuts to healthcare in the nation's history.

Passed in the civil rights era, the sister health insurance programs served as tools for the Democratic president Lyndon Johnson to desegregate American healthcare and fight poverty.