Thursday, October 24, 2013

I've been reading a lot...

...by the critics of the Affordable Care Act lately to find out just what the devil has them so worked up about Obamacare. And I can't help thinking of the video above in which Ronald Reagan warned of the dangers of Medicare. Listen to the Gipper and his predictions:

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. From here it's a short step to all the rest of socialism, to determining his pay. And pretty soon your son won't decide, when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him where he will go to work and what he will do. 

And one of these days, we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Did any of that come true?

So I wonder, are the predictions of today's critics of health care reform any more reliable than Reagan's were back in 1961?

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