75-13-A3

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Socialized Medicine I

Transcript Is there a health care crisis? Probably — but not in the U.S. I’ll be right back. A very fine journalist in the heartland of our country, M. Stanton Evans recently authored a fine essay entitled “Government Can Be Hazardous To Your Health.” Mr. Evans made a very telling point not only about the socialized medicine argument but also about how those who want more government and less freedom have been out maneuvering the rest of us. He points out that the — “secret of winning a debate is to define the grounds on which it is conducted.” Having established that he moved on to the much debated subject of whether we should have some version of socialized medicine in the U.S. and illustrates how those who want us to give up the best health care system in the world have lured even the Doctors, themselves into playing the other fellows game. Advocates of Nationalized Health Insurance, which is a nice sounding euphemism for socialized medicine, have repeated over and over again that our system of the private medical practice is a shame and disgrace and there is a health care crisis in America. And sure enough Congressmen, Senators & Doctors opposed to the proposals for Federal health care find themselves tacitly accepting that there is a problem. Then they get into the endless argument over whether the proposals for solving it are any good. Obviously an argument on that basis means we wind up with some kind of government medicine. The costly tragedy is there is no health care crisis in the U.S. Those who’ve been urging socialized medicine on us for at least two decades have invented a non-existent problem. There isn’t a country in the world with government medicine programs that can match what we have in the U.S.. Health care here is getting better and better and has been made increasingly available to more and more people. In fact where there are problems they are usually caused by government, not by the private practice of medicine. M. Stanton Stan Evans cited a speech made by the young Massachusetts Senator in 1970 who said, “In spite of the broad agreement that our population has a right to health care the evidence is overwhelming that this right cannot be exercised by most of our people. If we are to avoid the collapse of our health services and the disastrous consequences for tens of millions of our citizens we must take action — the cost is increasing but the quality is declining.” He’s talking about the country in which polio, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and a number of many other diseases have disappeared in our lifetime. Our life expectancy in this century has gone from age 49 years to 70. We have more doctors and hospitals in proportion to population than any other country in the world. There is one doctor for fewer than 600 people in the U.S. In England, with it’s socialized medicine the ratio is almost double that and for the last 10 yrs we’ve been increasing the number of doctors three times as fast as the increase in population. In even our rural areas hospital facilities are within a 25 mile distance of all but 2% of our population and only one tenth of 1% have to travel more than 50 miles to find a hospital of at least 25 beds. On any given day we probably average about 300,000 vacant hospital beds & hospital employees outnumber patients 2 to 1. The insurance program has kept pace. In 1940 only 12 mil. Americans had health insurance. By 1972 the figure was 182 million — 90% of our population. The plain truth is we don’t need Washington's help in treating our ills. I’ll be talk some more about this tomorrow. This is Ronald Reagan. Thanks for listening.		Details Batch Number 75-13-A3 Production Date 07/01/1975 Book/Page RihoH-364 Audio No Youtube? No
		Added Notes "Government Can Be Hazardous To Your Health" by M. Stanton Evans The "young Massachusetts Senator" is Edward Kennedy.