The '09 scaremongering award
Ronald Reagan's version of the "death panel" warning
The '09 scaremongering award
Dick Polman, Inquirer National Political Columnist
Conservatives in 2009 circulated all kinds of phony scare stories about health care reform - the government wants to kill granny, yetta yetta - but one particular salvo clearly wins top prize. Let's listen in:
"In our country, under our free-enterprise system, we have seen medicine reach the greatest heights that it has in any country in the world. Today, the relationship between patient and doctor in this country is something to be envied any place. The privacy, the care that is given to a person, the right to chose a doctor, the right to go from one doctor to the other.
"But let’s also look from the other side...(Under health care reform) the doctor begins to lose freedoms. It’s like telling a lie; one leads to another. First you decide the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government, but then the doctors are equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him he can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go some place else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.
"This is a freedom that I wonder if any of us has a right to take from any human being....All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man’s working place and his working methods, determine his employment. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay - and pretty soon your son won’t decide when he’s in school, where he will go, or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do."
Thus spoke Ronald Reagan, Hollywood actor and aspiring conservative politician, way back in 1961.
Care to guess why he was conjuring the looming specter of totalitarianism on our shores? Because Congress was considering a health care reform bill aimed at protecting seniors...the forerunner of the 1965 bill that ultimately became Medicare.
Medicare today is so popular among seniors that one conservative town-hall dolt famously screeched, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!" (Reagan would spin in his slumber if he'd heard that one.) Indeed, the Kaiser Family Foundation reported, in its national poll this past spring, that 77 percent of Americans perceive Medicare as "very important for the country as a whole."
For some inexplicable reason, various conservative talk-show hosts in 2009 kept replaying Reagan's '61 attack on the Medicare concept, somehow insisting that it was prescient about the threat of socialism (Rush Limbaugh said that the speech gave him "the chills").
But apparently they overlooked Reagan's laughworthy passages about how the government would dictate where doctors shall practice their craft, and how the government would dictate your son's destiny ("when he’s in school, where he will go, or what he will do for a living"). I don't recall any such socialist language in the Medicare law, although I suppose Reagan will prove prescient in the weeks ahead if the House and Senate Democratic conferees decide to hoist Stalin's portrait to the rafters and sneak those socialist dictats into the reform bill.
So as we give Reagan the '09 scaremongering award, let us also not forget that he delivered his '61 salvo at the behest of the American Medical Association....which yesterday endorsed the Senate version of health care reform, after earlier endorsing the House version. For some reason, the Gipper's dire predictions don't seem to cut it anymore with the AMA, and I bet it would be hard to find a conservative senior citizen anywhere who rejects his Medicare benefits on principle. And if what Reagan's '61 warnings about your son's freedom of movement sound ludicrous today, just imagine how citizens one generation hence will marvel at the current twaddle about "death panels."
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From the last blog;) nigel, sorry for the delay. There are always going to be sad stories & all of us are going to die of something. Like my late dad used to say, 'no one gets out alive':) The question is whether the people you mention would have been better off in a nationalized healthcare system or in ours? In England, the board of health turns down requests regularly. There are also long waiting periods for specialized medicine, such as brain surgery. There is also rationing of those vital surgeries and medicines. The govt. decides what is paid for and what is too expensive. What is the back story of the people you mentioned (insurance can't just drop people because they feel like it)? What procedures were already paid for and used? I believe our system of private hospitals, private insurance, private donations and a public safety net for the most needy cases is the best case scenario. I just don't trust our gov. to make health decisions in the personal best interests of each individual. If the govt. is broke in 10-15 years will the congress be looking to save a buck in healthcare? You betcha' :)— NEPhilly- Mr. Polman, I agree with Reagan and I don't think doctors and hospitals believe Medicare is the greatest:) The reason Reagan's bad prognosis didn't pan out is because doctors had the rest of healthcare to turn to. If doing to the rest of healthcare what medicare has done to senior healthcare as far as fraud & reimbursments are concerned is your best argument, it is a sad day for healthcare in America, imho.— NEPhilly
- NE--You are using hyperbole to criticize the healthcare bill, perhaps sincerely since where would a conservative get accurate information on this subject in the present climate? But anyway the point is the bill affects less than 5% of the system; the rest of it stays the same. And by the way, the status quo includes a huge government presence already.— liberal
- The Reagan speech quoted by Polman, and a very large number of comments on this blog over the last months, essentially parrot the position of von Hayek, in "The Road to Serfdom," a book published in 1946 that argued that any kind of social welfare legislation was just a slippery slope down to communism. Von Hayek's thesis was simply a pessimistic reflection of his own personal experience--he suffered through both Communism and Nazism. His views have been disproved by over 60 years of democracy and a decline of socialism in the various European nations and the United States. There is absolutely no historical evidence whatever that indicates that social welfare measures lead to communism. Actually, quite the contrary, since none of the European welfare states has ever moved far to the left, even when communism was a significant threat. Most historians in fact believe that the miserable condition of the working classes, not the nonexistent welfare states of the time, created a climate that encouraged extreme ideologies in the early 20th Century.— liberal
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- lib, that is all this bill will cover as passed. It will grow and grow like Social Security and Medicaid and Medicare before it. It is just a 1st step toward govt. run healthcare, imho. I don't like the status quo either. I am for importing cheaper drugs (dems voted it down), I am for tort reform (no vote) to lower defensive medicine costs, I am for letting/forcing insurance companies to compete across state lines (no vote), I am for not letting insurance companies drop customers for no reason (in there), I am for not letting them deny coverage for preexisting conditions (i think:). I am against cutting medicare by $500 Bil over 10 years, I am against raising taxes in a recession & I am against paying for Nebraska's medicaid expenses forever:) Again, I just don't think this bill does anything to lower the middle classes healhcare costs. Also, (as I said above) I just don't trust our gov. to make health decisions in the personal best interests of each individual. Bottom line.— NEPhilly
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- Polman should realize something. Enrollment in Medicare Part A is automatic, since the premiums were paid with payroll taxes. Medicare Part B is voluntary, but if you do not enroll immediately upon being eligible, you may have to pay a penalty for enrolling later. So maybe the reason no senior rejects their medicare benefits is one, they have no choice but to enroll in Medicare Part A, and two, they do not want to pay the 10% penalty for not enrolling in Medicare Part B.— tom - wilmington, de
- Scaremonger of the year would be Obama, he has the same argument for everything 'the sky is falling'.— dan19148
- liberal, a conservative would get accurate information about this bill in this climate from the some of the same if not better sources than a liberal would get accurate information about this bill in this climate. How arrogant can you be?— tom - wilmington, de
- Something else omitted by Polman? Today, the AMA represents only about 17% of all physicians. How many of the other 83% oppose this legislation?— tom - wilmington, de
- Obama said if this healthcare bill was not passed the nation would go bankrupt. Harry Reid said one person dies every ten minutes due to lack of health insurance, and that two people died just during his floor remarks. Yet, they are not scaremongering, right? And still nobody has answered that if Harry Reid is correct, how many more people will die before the "benefits" of this bill take effect and why not initiate them sooner and save all those lives? Maybe liberal could comment on that matter.— tom - wilmington, de
- liberal, I've read both Reid's original bill and the manager's amendment. From where do you get the bit about this only affecting 5% of the current system? Since your information seems to be so much better than anything a conservative would find, kindly provide your source so I may become more enlightened. Thanks in advance.— tom - wilmington, de
Cited by the Columbia Journalism Review as one of the nation's top political reporters, and lauded by the ABC News political website as "one of the finest political journalists of his generation," Dick Polman is a national political columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He is on the full-time faculty at the University of Pennsylvania, as "writer in residence." Dick has been a frequent guest on C-Span, MSNBC, CNN, NPR and the BBC. He covered the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential campaigns.
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