This special volume is a reflection by scholars from across Canada and around the world on Canadian medicare. Our goal was to marry history (and historical scholars) with policy (and policy scholars) to reflect on how history can help us better understand present policy problems in Canadian medicare. Many readers will be familiar with Winston Churchill's adage that 'those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it'. Philosophers, writers, thinkers and academics have opined for centuries on the need for a fulsome understanding of history. Churchill also feared that erasing the past would lead to 'the most thoughtless of ages. Every day headlines and short views'(National Churchill Museum, 2012). In other words, blindness to the past hinders innovation and progress and propagates, at best, an inadequate status quo. This special edition of the Journal of Health Economics Policy & Law has been supported by Associated Medical Services (AMS), which, for more than 40 years, has advanced the assessment and use of knowledge, especially historical knowledge, to understand and improve health care in Canada. AMS' (2017) first priority upon becoming a charity in 1976 was to support scholarly work in the history of medicine. AMS (2017) created five History of Medicine Chairs in the 1970s and, in 2015, introduced the History of Medicine and Healthcare Post-Doctoral Fellowship and the Hannah Chair in the History of Aboriginal Health at the Northern Ontario School of Medicine. In celebration of its 80th anniversary, AMS hosted a conference in Toronto in May 2017 that focused on