Lesson Plan: Medicare Timeline

Student Introduction

If you’ve been to a doctor, then you’ve used our medicare system. This system has not always been in place. If your family lived in Canada before 1966, the chances are that your parents or grandparents had to pay for their health care themselves, unless they were lucky enough to have private insurance. Imagine your family saving their money for an operation, or delaying the purchase of a car because they had to pay the bill for a major operation.

In this exercise, you will get to know one period in the history of medicare in detail, and will then see how it fits into the entire medicare timeline.

Student Steps

1. Once your group has been assigned a time period, visit the Making Medicare History and review the chapter that describes that time period. Do this independently.
After reading your assigned chapter in the Making Medicare History, be sure to look at the Key Players, Geography and Costs and Benefits sections. As you read, take note of key occurrences.

2. Independently, select the key events from your period.
Which, in your opinion, were the most important events related to medicare’s history?
Record your top three events on the Medicare Timeline Worksheet.

3. As a group, narrow your choices down to a maximum of five key events.
Discuss the possible key events and your reasons for selecting them.

4. Select images and write text.
Select an image to support each event.
Write a short caption for each event. The caption should identify the event and explain its importance to the history of medicare.
Ensure the tasks are divided evenly among group members.

5. Print out your images and text, and build the timeline.
Print out each image and the accompanying caption.
Decide who will present each image.
Take part in the timeline building exercise.

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WORKSHEET

Use this Worksheet with the Medicare Timeline Lesson Plan.

Student Instructions

Using the Making Medicare History, choose three key events from the period assigned to your group. Make use of this Worksheet during your group’s discussion about the events to include on the timeline.

Event #1

1. Name of event
2. Date
3. Importance of event to the history of medicare
4. Images available
5. What would you say about this event, in 25 words or less?

Event #2

1. Name of event
2. Date
3. Importance of event to the history of medicare
4. Images available
5. What would you say about this event, in 25 words or less?

Event #3

1. Name of event
2. Date
3. Importance of event to the history of medicare
4. Images available
5. What would you say about this event, in 25 words or less?