Medicare
I can't help noticing that somehow the vast majority of the elderly managed to get decent medical care before Medicare was invented in 1965. Elderly were not dying by thousands in the gutters, or being turned away in droves from hospitals. I was there.
Medicare was sold to the public as a small, supplemental program. Much as Social Security originally was.
These two programs, along with Medicaid, currently absorb over half of the entire Federal budget, and it has become not a supplement, but a necessity that gives politicians enormous leverage over the most reliable voting group in America.
A triumph for the socialists, regardless of whether it actually delivers the goods or not.