With all of the action of late and all of the discussion about health care reform, I thought some of you might be nterested in hearing the following speech by Ronald Reagan during the 1961 Operation Coffee Cup Campaign against Socialized Medicine as proposed by the Democrats, then a private citizen Ronald Reagan Speaks out against socialized medicine. There is no video ...




This was said almost 50 years ago in 1961, but it is very much like what is going on now. Reagan was talking about what ultimately became medicare, and he was right about it being a foot in the door. In the middle to late 1960's, before and after my stint in the U.S. Army, I was a CPA in Houston, Texas. One of my jobs was conducting a medicare cost audit for a hospital in Houston. In order to do the audit, I had to become somewhat of an expert on medicare cost reimbursement rules and regulations. During the course of my audit, I came to the inescabable conclusion that medicare would cause the cost of health care to rise dramatically over the next 20 years. Under the initial medicare program, medicare paid the average price charged in a geographic area for medical procedures and treatment. It did not take a rocket scientist to figure out that if medicare paid the average price for everything it covered, the price of everything it paid for would have to go up. By paying the average price, medicare insured that the average would rise over time, and as the average rose, so would the upper brackets of charges rise. Thus the cost of medical care had to rise. This upward pressure applied through medicare fueled the flame of escalating costs for all medical care