Medicare entered the new millennium nearly 16 years old. Throughout its life the core elements have remained untouched; most changes have been incremental and marginal, including those of the present Government. This stability contrasts starkly with the preceding fifteen years – from 1968 to 1983 – during which at least six distinct health-financing systems were tried. In those years Australia was the ideal laboratory for studying health finance, given our constant indulgence in new systems. Yet the sixteen years of relative stability since 1984 have been accompanied by a media babble stressing instability and crisis. Scarcely a year has passed without predictions of either imminent breakdown or slow decay. (With the formal acceptance of Medicare by the Liberal-National coalition in 1996, after thirteen years of unremitting hostility, the fact that such headlines have been less apparent suggests a political dimension to such predictions.) Yet the system itself has simply contradicted the doomsayers. Indeed by virtually any measure Medicare is in a rude state of health. “It has become’, in Stephen Duckett’s words, ‘part of Australia’s social infrastructure’.