Opponents have unleashed a torrent of hyperbolic claims and heated invective in an effort to stop President Obama's healthcare reform. But the president shouldn't be surprised by the rhetoric.
Three-quarters of a century ago, nearly identical denunciations were used in an attempt to kill legislation that created one of the country's most popular government programs: Social Security.
Though no one was talking about "death panels" back then, opponents claimed that Social Security would result in massive government control. A Republican congressman from New York, for example, charged: "The lash of the dictator will be felt, and 25 million free American citizens will for the first time submit themselves to a fingerprint test."
Another New York congressman put it this way: "The bill opens the door and invites the entrance into the political field of a power so vast, so powerful as to threaten the integrity of our institutions and to pull the pillars of the temple down upon the heads of our descendants." A Republican senator from Delaware claimed that Social Security would "end the progress of a great country and bring its people to the level of the average European."
Today, opponents of a public health insurance option claim that it would drive private health insurance out of business and put a bureaucrat between doctors and patients. Back then, opponents of Social Security warned that it would "establish a bureaucracy in the field of insurance in competition with private business" that would "destroy" private pensions.
Then as now, opponents played the socialism card. In hearings before the Senate Finance Committee, a senator from Oklahoma accusingly asked President Franklin D. Roosevelt's secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, "Isn't this socialism?" When Perkins emphatically answered no, the senator leaned forward and, with a conspiratorial whisper, pressed, "Isn't this a teeny-weeny bit of socialism?"
Unlike today, however, the political rhetoric never gained traction in 1935. Though nearly every Republican in Congress was vehemently opposed to Social Security, Roosevelt prevented them from controlling the debate. Months before Congress was presented with legislation, FDR sought to immunize the public.
