The substance of Medicare

In an interesting post on government-subsidized medical care and the over-utilization that sometimes accompanies it, Virginia Postrel tosses in this quote from a 1993 Reason article by Steve Hayward and Erik Peterson:

The two primary lessons of Medicare are the chronic problem of woefully underestimating program costs and the impossibility of genuine cost control. A closer look at Medicare shows why these two problems are certain to plague a government-administered universal health-care plan.

In 1965, when Medicare was signed into law, about one-third of the elderly in American were still mired in poverty despite Social Security. Today, that number is something on the order of one in ten.

Call me crazy, but I swear there's another "primary lesson" of Medicare somewhere in those numbers ...