- 4,716
I don't know if you are directing this to me or not but if you are I will be happy to post a picture of my University Diploma if you post yours. As for the "lib" comment nope not a lib. By your tone I can tell you would have been in the "NO" column on the following vote.
"It turns out that a significant number of Republicans did vote in favor of the Medicare bill when Congress took it up in 1965.
The House adopted a conference report -- a unified House-Senate version of the bill -- on July 27, 1965, and passed it by a 307-116 margin. That included 70 Republican "yes" votes, against 68 "no" votes.
Then, on July 28, 1965, the Senate adopted the bill by a vote of 70-24, with 13 Republicans in favor and 17 against. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it two days later.
So in the House, a slight majority of the Republican caucus voted for Medicare, and in the Senate, a significant minority voted in favor. Both of these strike us as more than "virtually no Republican support."
It's true that the Medicare bill was unpopular in certain segments of the Republican Party. In 1961, Ronald Reagan, the future president, famously released an LP with a speech in which he demonized "socialized medicine," citing proposals that sound a lot like the one passed four years later.
"Write those letters now; call your friends and then tell them to write them," Reagan said. "If you don't, this program, I promise you, will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow, and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. ... And if you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."
Other high-profile Republicans who opposed Medicare included Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater -- the unsuccessful Republican presidential nominee in 1964 -- and future president George H.W. Bush.
And as the Medicare bill progressed through the House, Republican support was scant. No Republicans voted for the bill until it reached the floor. It passed the Ways and Means Committee by a party-line vote of 17-8. And all four Republicans on the House Rules Committee — the panel that sets the boundaries of debate on all bills that come to the House floor — voted against the bill.
As the bill worked its way through the Senate, Republican support was somewhat stronger. In the final Finance Committee vote, the measure passed 12-5, with four of the committee's eight Republicans supporting it."
