What Ronald Reagan has to say about today’s “bipartisan” circus on health care
Gentlemen, start your teleprompters.
The nation readies itself for the spectacle of Obama’s special exercise in showmanship and partisan bi-partisanship, offering Republicans and the American people once last chance to sign on to the Democratic plan to take health care out of the hands of us plebs and hand it over to a caring, sharing government.
Any moment now, we will be treated to the President of the United States lecturing us about how he is going to improve health care by making it worse, how he is going to save money by spending $1 trillion dollars, how he is going to make the delivery of health care more efficient by turning it over to a government bureaucracy.
Does anyone — anyone — really believe him? Does he believe himself?
I do not know.
What I do know is that we’ve been down this road before. And one person who saw what socialized medicine was all about was Ronald Reagan. I’ve quoted from this magnificent speech before. Let me quote from it again: “One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people,” Reagan observed, “has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project.”
Ask Americans whether they want socialized medicine: the invariable answer is no. As Reagan notes, Truman tried it. He failed. But just present socialism as a liberal project and you can get people to roll over, wave their arms and legs in the air, and empty their wallets.
And that’s what’s been happening by degrees in this country.
Listen to Reagan’s whole speech here.
Perhaps the Republicans should simply play this soundtrack when the President stops talking. Note the bit about how imposing just a little bit of government control of medicine can be a foot in the door, providing a “mechanism that is indefinitely expandable” until it embraces the entire population. Remember that in the days to come.
And remember what Reagan said about the appeal to emotion: “Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.” Quite right.
Of course, it is “ridiculous,” as Reagan says to suggest that anyone in this country wants to deny medical care to people who can’t afford — except, that is, the utilitarians in charge of Obama’s health care plan — folks like Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel , who famously suggested doctors took the Hippocratic Oath — “first do no harm” — too seriously.
The odd thing, rhetorically, is that the people who are proposing to take our freedom away, load us with higher taxes, and give us much poorer health care have managed to wrap themselves, successfully, in the mantle of virtue. It has to do with that reluctance Reagan mentioned.
“Does he believe himself?”
God save us from the followers of John Rawls and John Kenneth Galbraith. I most assuredly do believe that Barack Obama is sincere. That’s what makes him so dangerous. He is convinced that big government polices managed by elites is the answer to just about everything. Obama is stunned that anyone might disagree. People are innately self-centered. They are inclined to argue backwards. Keynesian big government policies fantastically reward elites who graduated from the “best” universities. These individuals are virtually guaranteed great paying careers—and tremendous power. This stuff must also therefore be great for the unwashed masses.
‘What Ronald Reagan has to say about today’s “bipartisan” circus on health care’
… and what Ronald Reagan had to say about Medicare:
“The doctor begins to lose freedoms; it’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town and the government has to say to him you can’t live in that town, they already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else. And from here it is only a short step to dictating where he will go.”
—Ronald Reagan, in 1961, arguing against the creation of Medicare
Wrong then, wrong now.
Mr. Reagan accurately forecast the Canadian system, it seems. I know of one doctor who came to the university at which I work to be able to practice her specialty, because the Canadian health service told her they already had enough like her.
Power in the hands of the many is good.
Power in the hands of the few is bad.
Libertarians and most conservatives understand this while leftists choose to pretend otherwise. They dream of a world in which people have to do as they command, “for their own good” of course. This is why they are so rancid. They would deny those around them the fundamental right of self-determination. The world would be a better place without them in it.
From “The Logic of Failure” by Dietrich Doerner:
“The original value is twisted into its opposite….In our political environment, it would seem, we are surrounded on all sides with good intentions. But the nurturing of good intentions is an utterly undemanding mental exercise, while drafting plans to realize those worthy goals is another matter. Moreover, it is far from clear whether ‘good intentions plus stupidity’ or ‘evil intentions plus intelligence’ have wrought more harm in the world. People with good intentions usually have few qualms about pursuing their goals. As a result, incompetence that would otherwise have remained harmless often becomes dangerous, especially as incompetent people with good intentions rarely suffer the qualms of conscience that sometimes inhibit the doings of competent people with bad intentions. The conviction that our intentions are unquestionably good may sanctify the most questionable means.”
Mix the two, that is, the “good intentions plus stupidity” of the electorate with the “evil intentions plus intelligence” of the present administration, and you get the strange sophism of comment 1, and the apparent strength of the Democratic Party.
I meant the comment above by Joseph, not comment #1. Sorry.