RUSH: Let’s listen to Reagan, 1961. This is the Operation Coffee Cup campaign against socialized medicine, as then proposed by the Democrats. This is a portion of Citizen Ronaldus Magnus from a recording distributed by the American Medical Association.
REAGAN: Back in 1927 an American socialist, Norman Thomas — six times candidate for president on the Socialist Party ticket — said, ‘The American people would never vote for socialism, but,’ he said, ‘under the name of ‘liberalism,’ the American people will adopt every fragment of the socialist program.’ One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It’s very easy to disguise a medical program as a humanitarian project. Most people are a little reluctant to oppose anything that suggests medical care for people who possibly can’t afford it.
RUSH: This is Reagan. This is 1961, fifty years ago. Fifty years ago! Another portion of what he said.
REAGAN: Let’s also look from the other side at the freedom the doctor loses. A doctor would be reluctant to say this. Well, like you, I’m only a patient, so I can say it in his behalf. The doctor begins to lose freedoms. It’s like telling a lie, and one leads to another. First you decide that the doctor can have so many patients; they’re equally divided among the various doctors by the government. But then the doctors aren’t equally divided geographically, so a doctor decides he wants to practice in one town, and the government has the say to him, ‘You can’t live in that town. They already have enough doctors. You have to go someplace else,’ and from here it’s only a short step to dictating where he will go. This is a freedom that I wonder whether any of us have the right to take from any human being.
RUSH: Amen, and that is a superb way of looking at it: Do we have the right to take that way from anybody else, to dictate where they have to live. By the way, this was in HillaryCare. HillaryCare was going to apportion doctors geographically. Pure and simple. Here’s more: Operation Coffee Cup campaign against socialized medicine proposed by the Democrats, 1961.
REAGAN: You and I can do a great deal. We can write on our congressmen, to our senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms, and that at the moment the key issue is we do not want socialized medicine. 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 — as Norman Thomas said — we will awake to find that we have socialism. 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.
RUSH: Fifty years ago. Five-oh, five-oh years ago. Now, many things become obvious and apparent, that is the left never goes away, they never stop. Look how patient they’ve been, 50 years they’ve been pushing for this. That health care bill’s been written, sitting in some staffer’s draw for who knows how many decades with just modifications made to reflect current times. Philosophically, they’ve had that health care bill that’s now Obamacare written for who knows how many decades. Now, how do you interpret Reagan describing this? I mean, that’s pretty tough here to talk about losing our freedoms. We’re losing our freedoms! That’s not an idly irrelevant thing to say.
It’s pretty hard hitting, but how many Republicans these days want to talk about in terms of the Obama agenda resulting in loss of liberty or freedom? Oh, no, no! I don’t know too many, how many, if any. When you constrain yourself simply to talking about policy, freedom and liberty are kind of tough to integrate as a policy. Now, how can you have an honest debate on policy when the other side simply lies about their policies all the time? It’s why it’s so important to talk about where they’re coming from and who they are, so that their real agenda — what the real policies are — can be explained and exposed.