Universal Health Care--We Had A Dream

"Were our government for the people, we would have the best education in the world, universal health insurance, a decent sway of financing elections, and a massive commitment to sources of clean energy."
--William Sloane Coffin, in Credo

We are on the edge of a day like our country has not seen. 50 million citizens uninsured will have a chance at affordable health care. The fight has been long and hard.

• Nine Presidents faced horrendous opposition to this effort and failed.*
• President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law March 23, 2010
• The fight goes on even after this Bill has become law.
•  The Huffington Lost has pointed out that before this landmark health care reform law was passed since 2009 1,246 different organizations have registered to lobby Congress or the executive branch on the Affordable Care Act.
• Lobbying groups $1.06 billion between 2009 and 2010 to defeat this bill.
• Groups spent 126 million as the Supreme Court considered this bill.
• Since the Health Care Bill was assigned into law groups have spent over $262 million on television advertisements.
• Immediately after the bill’s passage the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity announced they would spend $9 million on an ad blitz campaign to oppose this ruling.
• The House of Representatives have 42 times to rescind this law. Each effort failed.
• About 36 states have refused to cooperate with this Bill.
• South Carolina has at least 320,000 citizens uninsured citizens.
• The state legislature has refused to cooperate with this Bill. 

When President Franklin Roosevelt the Social Security Bill this was the response of some of the opposition:

• “Ultimate socialistic control of life and industry” –National Association of Manufacturers
• “Industry has every reason to be alarmed at the social, economic, and financial implications...The dangers are manifest.” – A.P. Sloan, Chair General Motors
• “Never in the history of the world has any measure brought in here so insidiously designed as to prevent business recovery, to enslave workers, and to present any possibility of the employers providing work for the people.” – John Taber, Republican representative NY
• “The last of the dictator will be felt.” – Daniel Reed, Republican representative from NY i

Change is disrupting. Remember giving women the right to vote. Remember setting limits on child labor. Remember Civil Rights. Remember Voting Rights. Every effort to support all the people has always met with enormous opposition. Remember.

---

[i] H.W. Brands, Traitor To His Class,  p. 311
*Those nine Presidents were: Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. 

            --by Roger Lovette, lrl1035@bellsouth.net