The next time you hear...

...an opponent of health care reform say something like "you don't want a government takeover of health care," or "the Federal government can't run anything well," or that a single-payer system would be "socialized medicine," consider the following. According to recent polls, the most respected institution in America today is the military, a Federally-run government program. Or think of it as "socialized defense." In fact, the biggest abuses in recent years involving the military have come from Blackwater, the private defense contractor.

So maybe it's time for some of us to re-think some of those deeply-held assumptions from the Reagan years.