At National Review's Agenda blog, Avik Roy uses Ronald Reagan's famous tirade against Medicare as a way to highlight the Kerrs-Mill Act of 1960, a conservative alternative to Medicare:
You don't hear much about the Kerr-Mills Act anymore, for a reason. After the enormously consequential election of 1964, which returned Lyndon Johnson to the White House and swept large liberal majorities into Congress, the Kerr-Mills Act was rendered obsolete by the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965.
Had it been allowed to play out, Kerr-Mills could have evolved into an effective, federalist approach to health care reform. We'll never know.
I'm amused, if only because the real noteworthy thing about Reagan's performance was his warning that Medicare would put the United States on a road to Soviet tyranny:
A half-century later, and the United States is still a mixed capitalist economy, with a (mostly) functioning democracy, and a distinct lack of gulags, work camps, and mass executions. Indeed, even the avowedly anti-tyranny Ronald Reagan had little interest in ending Medicare once he became president, as it had yet to enslave ordinary Americans. The broader lesson? Conservatives will always attack expansions of the welfare state as intolerable constraints on freedom, and eventually accept them as standard parts of the political landscape.
