Toward the end of an article on Obama talking about health care, the New York Times shares a quote from the President which is his apparent attempt to calm fears of bad consequences with examples from history.  he probably should have picked different examples:

When President Roosevelt was working to create Social Security, opponents warned it would open the door to ‘federal snooping’ and force Americans to wear dog tags.

While I suppose that technically they aren’t dog tags, the national ID cards established by the Real ID Act seem rather close enough.  As far as “federal snooping” goes, it’s probably impossible to figure out which of Roosevelt’s policies should be blamed for opening the door to that, but as the Social Security Administration is now involved in everything from retirement savings to disability assistance to reviewing corporate hiring decisions, it strains credulity to suppose that Social Security didn’t lead to more federal involvement in our daily lives.

When President Kennedy and President Johnson were working to create Medicare, opponents warned of ‘socialized medicine.’ Sound familiar?

On the road to socialized medicine, you can either go all the way all at once, or you can go slowly, one step at a time.  The VA system, Medicare, and SCHIP are all steps along the way.  As we become used to (or worse, dependent on) these systems, we stop asking tough questions and we tend to neglect the overall pattern.  But there can be no doubt that medicine today is more socialized than it was before Kennedy and Johnson, even if both left the endgame for another day.

It took 70 years for the government to tell us to go get dog tags; a relatively small offense compared to the only-50-years-old socialized health care campaign.  These things take time, but the federal government has shown itself to be patient.  It is far less important what the government has done as of today than what it will do starting tomorrow.

Tags: Barack Obama, healthcare