They were wrong about Medicare, too | Cynthia Tucker

They were wrong about Medicare, too | Cynthia Tucker: "They were wrong about Medicare, too

12:15 pm November 19, 2009, by ctucker

Nicholas Kristof has a great column today on the critics of health care reform and how their criticisms about the dire consequences — socialism! government takeover! — are wrong. How does he know? It’s all been said before. Read his column or just go straight to an audio tape of Ronald Reagan blasting the proposed Medicare plan in 1961.



Reagan was wrong, too.

If you don’t (oppose it), this program I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country until one day as Normal Thomas said we will wake to find that we have socialism, and if you don’t do this and I don’t do this, one of these days we 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.

Medicare is now so popular that no politician dares talk about trying to change it. That included Reagan, who, when he ran for president, wanted voters to forget his earlier opposition to Medicare."