Medicare Becomes Law and Health Policy Becomes a Field of Its Own

Health policy studies how healthcare systems and regulation shape medical practice and access, asking what a therapy's actual documented legal and administrative status is in a given jurisdiction rather than assuming its traditional standing settles the question. The field took its modern American shape on 30 July 1965, when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Social Security Act Amendments establishing Medicare and Medicaid, a legislative undertaking large enough in scale and consequence that it drove the systematic academic study of how health law and funding decisions actually get made and what they change.

Many religious traditions maintain their own healing practices, faith healing, ritual purification treated as therapeutic, traditional herbal medicine tied to a spiritual system, and whether such a practice is licensed, regulated, tolerated or prohibited is a matter of documented health policy rather than of the tradition's own claim to legitimacy. The atlas draws on the discipline wherever a religious healing practice's legal standing is described, reporting the jurisdiction's actual regulatory position rather than either the practice's own claimed authority or an outsider's assumption about its status.