Today is April 1st and if there were ever any doubts about my political leanings, those doubts can now be put aside. And no, it’s not because today is April Fools’ Day.
I am a socialist. I know this because I am, as of today, a beneficiary of a federal government entitlement program. I am suckling at the teat of the federal welfare state, like so many of my fellow socialists.
What caused me to make this astonishing public revelation? It was something I received in the mail last week. It was insidiously placed inside an innocuous envelope from the Social Security Administration. It was a Medicare card.
Medicare is a social insurance program run by the federal government in order to provide health care for citizens aged 65 and over. It is, by definition, socialized medicine. And now that I have a Medicare card, I am, by definition, a card-carrying socialist.
In the United States, socialism has a bad reputation, and socialized health care has been the target of smear campaigns dating back to even before Medicare was first passed into law in 1965. Any form of government-sponsored health care has been deemed by the American Medical Association (AMA) to be nothing more than socialized medicine.
In fact, the term “socialized medicine” was popularized by a public relations firm working for the AMA in 1947 to disparage President Truman’s proposal for a national health care system.
The AMA continued to fight long and hard against such government-sponsored health care programs. During the late Fifties and early Sixties, it conducted a nationwide campaign to oppose the Democrats’ plans to add a program of health insurance for the elderly to Social Securty.
The AMA hired actor Ronald Reagan for Operation Coffee Cup to spread the word about the creeping danger of socialized medicine. In his ten minute recording, “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine,” the then-future US president advised listeners that, should Medicare become law, “one of these days you and I 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.”
Yikes! At first I was inspired by Reagan’s words of warning and I thought about tearing up my newly arrived Medicare card. I did not want to be faced with having to tell my children that it was my fault that men in this country are no longer free.
But two things stopped me from shredding my Medicare card. First, before Medicare, many retirees and their families were going broke trying to pay for needed medical care. Second, and probably more important, my children don’t listen to anything I have to say anyway.
So now I have a Medicare card, making me a card-carrying socialist. The good news, though, is that the mailman finally delivered something I can use.
Isn’t it funny how the term “socialized medicine” has resurfaced some six decades later, this time to disparage President Obama’s health care reform initiative?
There’s nothing like Republicans for wanting to keep this country moving forward...into the past.
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