http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/adventures-in-old-age/200908/medicare-is-socialism Ronald Reagan, on behalf of the AMA, released an LP record (remember those?), Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine, in which he said:
"Write those letters now; call your friends and 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...And if you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days we 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."
As I recall, Ronnie spent HIS sunset years being President of the United States and proclaiming it was 'Morning in America'.
Anyway, to continue:
Other politicians shared similar sentiments.
Barry Goldwater in 1964: "Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink."
George Herbert Walker Bush also was part of the chorus in 1964 when he called Medicare "socialized medicine."
And as late as 1996, when he was running for president, Bob Dole bragged, "I was there, fighting the fight, voting against Medicare . . . because we knew it wouldn't work in 1965."
You can see that the level of mendacity and fear-mongering has not really changed all that much, it's just gotten more hysterical.