Critics storm that health care reform is “a cruel hoax and a delusion.” Ads in 100 newspapers thunder that reform would mean “the beginning of socialized medicine.”
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page predicts that the legislation will lead to “deteriorating service.” Business groups warn that Washington bureaucrats will invade “the privacy of the examination room,” that we are on the road to rationed care and that patients will lose the “freedom to choose their own doctor.”…
John Taber, a Republican representative from New York, went further and said… “Never in the history of the world has any measure been brought here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers.”
…The American Medical Association was vehement, with Dr. Donovan Ward, the head of the A.M.A…. declaring that “a deterioration in the quality of care is inescapable.” The president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons went further and suggested that for doctors to cooperate… would be “complicity in evil.”
The Wall Street Journal warned darkly in editorials… [that it] amounted to “politicking with a nation’s health.” It quoted a British surgeon as saying that in Britain, government health care was “crumbling to utter ruin” and suggested that the United States might be heading in the same direction.
Sound familiar?
Except these are all quotes about Medicare, from 1965, or Social Security, from 1935. And we know how tragically those two turned out.
