George Hughes Patient Visitors? 2/18/1956
In 1943, legislators proposed a compulsory national health care plan. The measure met opposition almost immediately. It was referred to a subcommittee and entered a legislative limbo, having to be reintroduced again and again.
One of the bill’s authors was Michigan’s John Dingell, who represented the 15th Congressional district from 1933 to 1955. He was succeeded by his son, who has held this post from 1955 to today.
Now the longest-serving representative, John Dingell Jr. continues to promote his father’s Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill. Sixty-six years have elapsed, but the bill still lingers in committee, unable to move forward or to be killed. Other legislation has come and gone. The government has taken action on other issues, many of which were not as important.
We asked Dr. Benjamin Franklin why the government has not resolved the issue in over a half century of deliberation. The problem, he indicated, is that lawmakers like to work within familiar grounds. Radical change only comes when pressed by emergencies:
“Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.”
5 Comments
AMEN,AMEN,AMEN!!! To the wisdom of Ben Franklin.
“Government Health Care Plans” should not even exist in the United States of America.
Our government was not instituted to guide, direct or control the medical industry.
The federal government must secure our Constitutional rights and provide for defense of the country State and local governments keep the peace; adjudicating matters of force and fraud. With the exception of a very few other limited services, all else remains with the people; the domain of free-thinking, free-acting individuals.
This, in capsule form, is the Republic Benjamin Franklin helped to give us.
When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for free-thinking free-acting people to fight against the tyrany of intrenched special interest groups, it behooves them to tell that to their freely elected representatives in congress.
This is what anybody who thinks at all already knows and we are fighting a tough fight to cause the injustice of the present medical situation.
Millions of children without medical coverage, thousands of mothers who don’t get any pre-natal care and give birth in emergency rooms, hospitals who must close their ER’s, millions of handicapped people due to no pre-natal and infant care are the good enough reasons to tell our representatives to change the system.
I was insulted by the callousness of the previous comments. God help those people who won’t help others.
We need to put aside bipartisonism and get a health care bill enacted, quickly fix problems that arise, and keep the will of the people and the needs of the people foremost in executive decisions. .
FYI, every person, whether American or not, is guaranteed treatment in the emergency room of the American hospital. Among other terrible consequences, what this bill is about is taking that away, in its current form. You have the issue framed backward, and I agree that compassion for all is a must. So, see to it that this health care boondoggle is defeated soundly.
I love the “putting aside bipartisonism” joke, sort of a double negative. It would equal being partisan, which is what we now have – a Democratic partisan bill that no Republican supports. I agree that we should kill this one sided bill.
Our founding fathers warned 100% against anything resembling the current government takeover, including and especially the health care bill(s). Countless founding fathers’ comments echo this theme, penned here by Thomas Jefferson, “If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of taking care of them, they must become happy.”
Said another way, Jefferson said “…we shall all consider ourselves unauthorized to saddle posterity with our debts, and morally bound to pay them ourselves; and consequently within what may be deemed the period of a generation, or the life expectancy of the majority.”
Sam Adams said this, “the Utopian schemes of leveling re distribution of the wealth and a community of goods (central ownership of the means of production and distribution), are as visionary and impractical as those which vest all property in the Crown. These ideas are arbitrary, despotic, and, in our government, unconstitutional.”
What did Ben Franklin say about this, you ask? “I have long been of your opinion, that your legal provision for the Poor (in England) is a very great evil operting as it does to the encouragement of idleness. We have followed your example, and begin now to see our error, and. I hope, shall reform it.”