Click on the cartoon to see a larger version.
You can listen to Reagan’s speech here, and see I’m not exaggerating (he begins talking about loss of freedoms for doctors at about six minutes, and predicts total fascism at around seven minutes). Listening to it, it’s interesting how little the debate has changed between 1961 and today.
If it’s true, as Reagan claims, that the idea behind Medicare was to take a first step that would inevitably lead to socialized medicine for all citizens, then boy did that plan backfire.
I love your G. Gordon Liddy in panel three. At least I hope I do.
That’s a great one, Amp…but the ghost of my man JG Ballard gently reminds you that you shoulda drawn Reagan with one of those big, sweet grandfatherly smiles of his, that he always employed with the evil capitalist-greedhead rhetoric.
Interesting. I never knew that the AMA lobbied against medicare. At this point, the AMA is actually moderately pro-health care reform and universal coverage (though still against single payor). Shows how far we’ve come or how bad it’s gotten, depending on your point of view.
Dianne,
It’s a sign of how bad insurance companies have become about paying claims. My dad is a dyed-in-the-wool Reagan Republican, and he has days (admittedly, not every day, but some days) when he declares that we should go to a “Medicare for all” single payer plan. Yes, Medicare’s reimbursement rates suck, but at least they always pay and then he wouldn’t have to employ several people to do nothing but deal with the varying billing systems, calling the insurers for money, calling the patients for money… then again he is in a fairly geriatric specialty, so his occasional preference to just have ALL of his patients on Medicare may not apply to physicians who have very few patients on Medicare right now and like it that way.
If competition is so great why are the insurance companies shitting bricks at the prospect of an alternative?
Lilian,
Because they’re worried that it will become like Medicare, where payments are made from general government revenues rather than solely from the payments collected from enrollees over the course of their working lives. At this point, all of the public option bills say that the program would have be self-funded after start-up costs, but the question is whether the government would stick to that in the face of bad PR (e.g. people asking for expensive, experimental cancer treatment that would break the budget if given, but will arouse public outrage if not given).
So far, our two main allegedly self-funded entitlement-but-not-welfare programs (Social Security and Medicare) have a track record of spending much more money than they have been taking in — making them welfare in fact if not in name (or in the minds of the recipients, who will all tell you that they PAID for what they’re getting). Which makes sense; the government hasn’t been taxing people enough in payroll taxes to cover how long and medically-expensive Americans’ lives are.
On a related note, there is this article from 2004 from the New Yorker that reports on relationship between height of a population and its relative wealth and equality.
At this point, I think only an American version of Hugo Chavez can sucessfully champion socialized medicine. Great comic though.
Very interesting board and comments. I have written up many of these ideas on my site about health reform and I think anybody interested in this blog will find the information I have put together very salient. Many of the ideas are things I am studying right now at The Wharton School as an MBA, although I combine thoughts as a practitioner in industry as well.
Please do check it out!
http://www.satvathealthcare.com
All ad profits go to fight ulcerative colitis!
Best,
Amir