Heidi Przybyla: Socialism Threat Has Long History for Health-Care Overhaul Foes
[Heidi Przybyla is a reporter for Bloomberg]
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The debate is about health care. The threat is of a march toward “socialism.” The words come from a famous voice.
Not Sarah Palin in 2009. It was Ronald Reagan in 1961.
“From here, it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism,” Reagan, then an actor, warned in a 1961 record sponsored by the American Medical Association after President John F. Kennedy created a commission that laid the foundation for Medicare.
Many of the arguments against President Barack Obama’s overhaul effort are refrains from previous debates over health- care policy and Social Security dating to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
“There are substantial echoes of the past rhetoric in what we’re hearing today,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek.
In 1945, the AMA helped portray Truman’s proposal for national health insurance as a creep toward communism. Three years later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce produced a pamphlet, “You and Socialized Medicine.” In 1993, the health-insurance industry tried to scuttle President Bill Clinton’s proposed overhaul by funding ads featuring a fictional couple who decried a “government takeover” of health care.
Slipping Support
Similar lines of attack by Republicans have been used to counter Obama’s health-care plan, and support for his effort has dropped. Fifty-three percent of Americans believe Obama wants to eventually take over the health-care system, according to an Aug. 28 to 31 CNN/Opinion Research Poll.
Former Alaska Governor Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, warned in an Aug. 7 statement on Facebook of health-care rationing that would lead to “death panels” for the sick and the elderly if Obama’s plan were adopted, and later said Obama’s plan would lead the country toward socialism.
The experiences of Truman, Kennedy and Clinton offer lessons for Obama, said Richard Rapaport, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has researched the AMA’s initiative in the 1960s, dubbed “Operation Coffeecup.”
Once the public associates the word “socialism” with a plan, it’s hard to change the impression, he said. In 1945, when Truman addressed Congress about a national insurance plan, 75 percent of Americans supported the proposal. By 1949, after it was targeted by opponents, only 21 percent did, according to a book by former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”
‘More of a War’
Rapaport said emotions run even higher today.
“It’s escalated into even more of a war than it was back then,” Rapaport said.
Still, he said, the public would come to embrace programs put in place.
“Whatever bill gets out of this, once it gets in front of the people,” he said, “they’ll want to continue it.” He cited the controversy over Medicare’s creation. Today, he said, Americans “would kill if it was taken away.”
While the opposition campaign led by the AMA scuttled a 1961 Senate bill, Medicare was enacted four years later under President Lyndon Johnson. Today it provides health insurance for 45 million elderly and disabled Americans.
In his Sept. 9 speech to Congress to pitch his health-care proposal, Obama sharpened his response to critics.
“To my Republican friends, I say that rather than making wild claims about a government takeover of health care, we should work together,” Obama said...
Read entire article at Bloomberg.com
Sept. 14 (Bloomberg) -- The debate is about health care. The threat is of a march toward “socialism.” The words come from a famous voice.
Not Sarah Palin in 2009. It was Ronald Reagan in 1961.
“From here, it’s a short step to all the rest of socialism,” Reagan, then an actor, warned in a 1961 record sponsored by the American Medical Association after President John F. Kennedy created a commission that laid the foundation for Medicare.
Many of the arguments against President Barack Obama’s overhaul effort are refrains from previous debates over health- care policy and Social Security dating to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
“There are substantial echoes of the past rhetoric in what we’re hearing today,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek.
In 1945, the AMA helped portray Truman’s proposal for national health insurance as a creep toward communism. Three years later, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce produced a pamphlet, “You and Socialized Medicine.” In 1993, the health-insurance industry tried to scuttle President Bill Clinton’s proposed overhaul by funding ads featuring a fictional couple who decried a “government takeover” of health care.
Slipping Support
Similar lines of attack by Republicans have been used to counter Obama’s health-care plan, and support for his effort has dropped. Fifty-three percent of Americans believe Obama wants to eventually take over the health-care system, according to an Aug. 28 to 31 CNN/Opinion Research Poll.
Former Alaska Governor Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate, warned in an Aug. 7 statement on Facebook of health-care rationing that would lead to “death panels” for the sick and the elderly if Obama’s plan were adopted, and later said Obama’s plan would lead the country toward socialism.
The experiences of Truman, Kennedy and Clinton offer lessons for Obama, said Richard Rapaport, a visiting scholar at the University of California at Berkeley who has researched the AMA’s initiative in the 1960s, dubbed “Operation Coffeecup.”
Once the public associates the word “socialism” with a plan, it’s hard to change the impression, he said. In 1945, when Truman addressed Congress about a national insurance plan, 75 percent of Americans supported the proposal. By 1949, after it was targeted by opponents, only 21 percent did, according to a book by former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle, “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis.”
‘More of a War’
Rapaport said emotions run even higher today.
“It’s escalated into even more of a war than it was back then,” Rapaport said.
Still, he said, the public would come to embrace programs put in place.
“Whatever bill gets out of this, once it gets in front of the people,” he said, “they’ll want to continue it.” He cited the controversy over Medicare’s creation. Today, he said, Americans “would kill if it was taken away.”
While the opposition campaign led by the AMA scuttled a 1961 Senate bill, Medicare was enacted four years later under President Lyndon Johnson. Today it provides health insurance for 45 million elderly and disabled Americans.
In his Sept. 9 speech to Congress to pitch his health-care proposal, Obama sharpened his response to critics.
“To my Republican friends, I say that rather than making wild claims about a government takeover of health care, we should work together,” Obama said...