Ronald Reagan, Not Knowing What Socialism Is

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MEDICARE/MEDICAID! Fifty short years ago, President LBJ signed the ground breaking legislation into law, and fifty years later, the verdict is in: it was the right thing to do. Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security have proven that socialism does work, and that socialism and capitalism can make good bedfellows. Millions of American senior citizens have been saved from poverty from social security, millions more from disastrous health outcomes through medicare, and America's poor have benefited enormously from medicaid. And the economics of it works, as long as people pay their taxes and nobody "borrows" from the trust funds which service these programs. Medicare and Medicaid are so effective that one wonders whether we need Obamacare at all, but for the fact that everyone should heave health insurance, not just the old and the poor. Plus, national health insurance can relieve business owners of a great burden on their budgets. All this, despite dire warnings from corporate spokesperson Ronald Reagan, who went on television during the great debate of 1964, and, sounding reasonably lucid, proclaimed that if medicare/medicaid became a reality, we would awaken someday to an awareness that we were living in a socialist country. The day has come, we are awake, socialism is here, and Ronald Reagan's lost lucidity is long gone. The Gipper, in his 1964 TV ad, failed to mention that American fire and police departments are not privately owned and operated for profit, and neither are the city streets, state and federal highways, bridges, sewer systems, and public schools. Socialism in America, believe it or not, was extant long before Ronald Reagan was born, and in every above example of it, seems to function perfectly well. The American Medical Association, the labor union for doctors, was also opposed to socialized health insurance; heaven forbid that any government action should threaten the American for high profit doctoring business. This was predictable, and perhaps a bit disgusting. What is frightening is that a person can become president of the united States without knowing what socialism is, or even realizing that he is surrounded by it.