On Dec 12, 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would lower drug prices for people on Medicare and private insurance, and allow the program finally to be able to negotiate drug prices with manufacturers. No sooner had the bill passed, when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY.) called it “socialist” and vowed to block it.
For the past 85 years, Republicans, conservative Democrats, and special interest health lobbyists have used the bogeyman of “socialism” to cast a red shadow over health care reform.
In 1935, during debate on the Social Security Act, President Franklin Roosevelt tried to include health care reform in his bill. According to an FDR aide, the White House was “deluged with telegrams from all parts of the country protesting against this nefarious plot.” So as not to jeopardize the Social Security package, Roosevelt pulled health care out of the package.
On Sept. 6, 1945, President Harry Truman delivered a special message to Congress enumerating his Economic Bill of Rights for every American, which included “the right to adequate protection from the economic fears of sickness.” Truman added, “People shall remain free to choose their own physicians and hospitals…. What I am recommending is not socialized medicine. Socialized medicine means that all doctors work as employees of government.” But the AMA called Truman’s plan “un-American … socialized medicine,” and accused his Administration of being “followers of the Moscow party line.” Truman’s health care plan never emerged from Congress
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the AMA funded a campaign called Operation Coffee Cup, enlisting doctors’ wives to organize coffee meetings to send letters to Congress. The AMA’s message was that Medicare was an “irreversible step toward the complete socialization of medical care.”
In 1961, actor Ronald Reagan recorded an LP album for the AMA called “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine.” “If compulsory health insurance” ever happened, Reagan cautioned, “behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have come to know it in this country.” “One day,” Reagan warned, “we will awake to find that we have Socialism.”
On July 30, 1965, before signing the Medicare bill, President Lyndon Johnson met for two hours with the AMA, to “convince doctors that the government was not planning to straight-jacket the medical profession.” A few weeks before Medicare was signed, the AMA held a convention in New York city which adopted nine resolutions calling for a boycott of Medicare.
On March 23, 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, which left major markets in place for private insurance carriers. It is projected that by 2025, privately-run Medicare Advantage plans will reach 38 million beneficiaries, or roughly 50% of enrollees in Medicare.
In 2018, when the concept of “single payer health care” — now rebranded as “Medicare for All” (M4A) — ignited as a 2020 presidential election issue in the hands of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, health care giants like the AMA, the American Hospital Association, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturing Association, created a new lobbying entity, called The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future, which spent $143 million in 2018 to lobby against M4A. Many top Democratic consultants are working against M4A as well, because they believe it will unravel President Obama’s ACA legacy, which gave private insurance companies a widening market.
At a public rally last June, Sen. Bernie Sanders laid out his vision for “democratic socialism.” “Franklin Delano Roosevelt helped create a government that made transformative progress in protecting the needs of working families,” Sanders said. “Today … we must take up the unfinished business of the New Deal and carry it to completion…Roosevelt…was opposed by big business, Wall Street, the political establishment, by the Republican Party and by the conservative wing of FDR’s own Democratic Party. And he faced the same scare tactics then that we experience today — red baiting, xenophobia, racism and anti-Semitism.”
Many Americans can’t distinguish socialism from communism. Yet in a May, 2019 Gallup Poll, 43% of Americans said socialism would be a good thing for the country. Ronald Reagan feared that one day Americans would wake up “to find that we have Socialism.” Despite the “red scare” of socialism, voters are finally waking up to the value of universal health care, a promise made to every American since 1935.
Activist and author Al Norman of Greenfield served as executive director of the Mass Home Care network in Massachusetts for 33 years, and is the founder of Sprawl-Busters.