Paul Ryan Quotes
You're going to hear a lot from President Obama and yes, from Joe Biden, you're hearing a little bit about Medicare these days. What they will not tell you is they turned Medicare into a piggybank to fund 'Obamacare.' They took $716 billion dollars to pay for the 'Obamacare' program.
Ryan, Paul. "Campaign Rally Remarks." 15 Aug. 2012, Miami University, Oxford, OH. Address.
The reason this quotation is noteworthy is the reality that Medicare is the largest Federal Government program that there is. It is not only funded by the Government, but Government employees actually operate it from making the policies to paying the tens of millions of bills to doctors and hospitals. The protester who created the sign, like the overwhelming majority of Tea Party enthusiasts are opposed to big government and especially to government involvement in any health care operations. Obamacare was very controversial and most Tea Party enthusiasts were lobbying heavily against the Government “taking over” the American health care system. Medicare is one of the most popular Federal programs in American history and many people who were opposed to Federal health program management and were ignorant of the fact that Medicare was operated by the Government, were expressing their concern. The sign did not seem to distress any of the thousands of Tea Party followers in the audience, but the main takeaway was that there were many American who just assumed that anything that was run well and they liked could not be run by the government.
This true statement hurt Reagan somewhat but not enough to defeat him. At the time, only a small percentage of Americans had any experiences yet with what became one of the most popular programs in American history. Reagan, once in office never repeated any of his early anti-Medicare statements and ironically, in the 8 years of the Reagan Presidency, Medicare became extremely popular.
Paul Davis Ryan is the 54th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.
