Beyond the Zeitgeist

If you’re beyond the Zeitgeist, you’ll get this: Paul Krugman, in his NY Times blog, reports that Sarah Palin’s closing speech in Thursday night’s debate quoted Ronald Reagan campaigning against Medicare! (See Oct. 3.) There’s a link to an article with Reagan’s original 1962 speech, part of a campaign kit distributed to women who were supposed to help the AMA defeat “socialized medicine.” Reagan’s quote, adapted by Palin: “And if you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, 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.”  

Socialized medicine is portrayed as the thin edge of the wedge of the dreaded socialism, when not just doctors and patients but everyone under any circumstance would be told what they could and couldn’t do by the government. 

Of course, without universal health care, doctors, and their patients not eligible for Medicare, are told what they can and can’t do by the corporate healthcare “providers,”  whose only goal is to minimize expenses (patient care) and maximize profits (through denial of care, ever-higher premiums, drug sales, etc.).