Teddy One-Note

By Randall Hoven

Republicans have been offering major health care reform for the last 40 years. Democrats have defeated such reforms every time, holding out for nothing less than a single-payer, government-run system. Ted Kennedy was leading the just-say-no charge that whole time. He would tolerate nothing less than a whole-hog, government monopoly of health care.

I recently documented a few such Republican proposed reforms going back to the mid-1990s. But look at this YouTube video to see that everything old is new again.

Had we simply done what Republicans wanted in 1971, or 1974, or 1995, or 2007, to mention a few such years, we would not now be in the fix we are in. What is that fix? Medicare costs many times more than ever envisioned and will go broke by 2017. Health care takes up 17% of the economy and will soon take 20% and more. (It took about 5% of the economy when Medicare was introduced.) Government is now responsible for about 60% of all health care spending.

Forty years of saying "no" to anything other than a government-run system. That, and letting Mary Jo Kopechne suffocate to death in total underwater blackness while he cooked up schemes to avoid blame, are Ted Kennedy's legacies.

hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ