Roger’s Rules

By Roger Kimball

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Joseph
2010-02-25 12:40:47

‘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.