SOCIALISM!!!! (Perspective on the Health Care Debate)

In 1961, Ronald Reagan spoke out against socialized medicine on an LP titled "Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine." On that LP, the future-president claimed that Medicare would be the first victory of a gradual takeover of the United States by socialists. Not only that, Medicare would lead the government to tyranny. Soon, he said, the government would be telling its citizens where to live, what schools to go to, and what jobs they could have.

Medicare passed, of course, in 1965, and has been functioning ever since. Somehow, perhaps through divine intervention, none of Mr. Reagan's predictions have come to pass. I have yet to receive a letter from the feds ordering me to move to Indiana and become a dentist. In fact, today the conservative movement has warmed up to Medicare. A recent poll showed that 62% of Republicans want the government to "stay out of Medicare," which is a bit like telling your engine to stay out of your car.

The "SOCIALISM!" approach to debate hasn't just been used against health care reform. It was also a frequent argument against the civil rights movement, with some opponents going so far as to claim that desegregation was a Soviet plot to weaken America. Going back further, big business interests fought against labor reform at the turn of the 20th century by claiming that extending benefits to workers would spell the death of capitalism.

Naturally, now that we have a political moderate in the White House, the conservative movement has dusted off the "SOCIALISM!" war cry, added a dash of casual xenophobia (for flavor), and sent it out to once again cheapen and insult any kind of intelligent debate. Obama's health care plans, it is said, will lead us down the road to tyranny. Doctors will be unable to properly help patients. Elderly people will be killed rather than treated. Rush Limbaugh recently made the assertion that Obama's health care plans are actual covert reparations for slavery. Somehow.

I think I've found a way to stay sane. There's a reason why we can laugh at how paranoid Reagan sounds on that old LP. There's a reason why we look at those segregationists and wonder how they could be so filled with hate. It's because they lost. Medicare was passed, segregation was abolished, and history was written by the victors. If progressives had lost, we might be sighing with relief that Medicare was never created, and being thankful to those racist protesters for speaking "truth" to power. Thank god the liberals won.

And we'll win this time too. Hell, we've already won with the American people. According to a recent poll, 62% of Americans would prefer a universal health care system to our current one. That's pretty much a mandate. But the opinions of Americans pale in comparison with the wealth of the health insurance industry, which has spent $380 MILLION dollars to influence politicians and block health care legislation.

But we progressives have been up against worse than this, and we've always come out on top. America has a long history of fighting for reform, battling against ignorance and lies, and eventually succeeding. We'll do it again this time, and someday a new generation will wonder why conservatives seemed so dead-set against helping people stay healthy. They'll wonder how a portion of the country could fight against something so obviously necessary.

Going back to that old Ronald Reagan LP, we find a quote that, if you replace "Medicare" with "Obamacare," could have dribbled out of the mouth of Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck just yesterday: "If you don’t [stop Medicare] and I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free." Of course, Reagan lived well into his sunset years and never had to worry about Medicare destroying America's freedom. This all poses the question - if he considered Medicare to be such a threat to the country, why didn't he move to have it dismantled once he became president? Why was Medicare, once a threat large enough to potentially destroy the nation, become so insignificant two decades later?

"Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialism" was recorded, distributed, and funded entirely by the American Medical Association, as part of its costly and sweeping campaign to defeat Medicare.