Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Ronald Reagan-Gov. health care

This is the transcript from Reagan's speech on health care. If your interested you can find the speech on utube. (I dont know how to load utube links yet). His thoughts are amazing, his insight then, and now relating  to problems of our day are uncanny.



Ronald Reagan: "I have been asked to talk on the several subjects that have to do with the problems of the day. . . .

"Now back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas, six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket, said the American people would never vote for socialism. But he said under the name of liberalism the American people would adopt every fragment of the socialist program.

"But at the moment I'd like to talk about another way because this threat is with us and at the moment is more imminent. One of the traditional methods of imposing socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It's very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Now, the American people, if you put it to them about socialized medicine and gave them a chance to choose, would unhesitatingly vote against it. We have an example of this. Under the Truman administration it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and, of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this.

"Perhaps a little background on the subject of socialized medicine will prove helpful to you. To begin with, socialized medi­cine simply means compulsory national health insurance, med­icine controlled and administered by the federal government; financed through compulsory taxation. For many years, an at­tempt has been made to socialize the practice of medicine through the Social Security tax mechanism.

"The doctor begins to lose freedom...First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients. They are equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then 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's only a short step to dictating where he will go...All of us can see what happens once you establish the precedent that the government can determine a man's working place and his working methods, determine his employment.

"The problem with a voluntary social insurance system is that it would almost certainly lead to a form of “adverse selection” in which high-wage workers opted out of the system leaving only low-wage workers to participate. Such “adverse selection” is invariably a poison-pill for any insurance-based system, which depends on the widest possible pooling of risk. Or, to put it another way, if a form of federal taxation were voluntary, how many people would volunteer to pay it?"

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