Annals of McCain - Palin, XVIII: quoting Reagan

My father was an old fashioned "physician and surgeon," something we don't have today. He did everything: delivered you, took out your appendix or tonsils, treated your parents' heart disease, your childhood diseases, your broken bones, your kids' childhood diseases, the diabetes you got later in life and the heart disease that went along with it. And probably delivered your grandchildren, too. He went to the office seven days a week, made housecalls in the middle of the night, met cooks from the White Castle hamburger chain in his office at 3 am to sew up their lacerations, made his own slides and blood smears (I have his microscope), took and developed his own x-rays, etc. He never made more than $10,000 in his best year and most of his years weren't the best. Medical practice was highly competitive and not particularly well paid. There was little medical insurance. He died in 1957 shortly after making a house call. Seven years later Medicare and other third party payment schemes arrived and made doctors rich.

I mention this because Governor Palin brought it to mind last night in the debate with Senator Biden. At the close of the night's festivities she quoted Ronald Reagan:

It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don't pass it to our children in the bloodstream; we have to fight for it and protect it, and then hand it to them so that they shall do the same, or we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free. (via Paul Krugman's blog)

Those aren't Reagan's actual words, though, and the context was certainly different. What Paul Krugman reminds us of is that the actual words were written and supported by the lobbyists of the American Medical Association and committed to a phonograph record in 1960, read by Ronald Reagan. The record was played at coffee klatsches and houseparties sponsored by the AMA's "ladies auxiliary," part of a vast and coordinated anti-Medicare political campaign. At the close of the long recording, Reagan calls on his listeners to put pressure on elected officials:

Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don't, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day . . . we will awake to find that we have so cialism. 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. (Quoted in Operation Coffeecup, an Essay by Larry DeWitt)

The irony, of course, is that Medicare made AMA's membership rich and now they are flooding the airwaves with their own lobbying adds bemoaning the lack of health insurance they fought against in the years after World War II.

Now that I am covered by Medicare myself, hearing Reagan's words come out of Governor Palin's mouth almost a half century later brings a certain bitter smile to my lips. My father disagreed with Reagan's philosophy and would have detested the McCain - Palin ticket. He's gone. But I'm still here.