Carson is quoting Lenin to criticize Obamacare. Is the reference bogus?
Affordable Care Act critic only latest to quote, or misquote, Soviet leader on health care
October 12, 2013|By Jean Marbella, The Baltimore Sun
It was the most expensive campaign ever launched, but opponents were determined to defeat the president's health care reform plan.
"Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life?" began one of the pitches used in a massive advertising and lobbying effort. "Lenin thought so. He declared: 'Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialized State.'"
That may sound like it was ripped from today's headlines — or at least, the debut this week of Fox News' latest talking head, Dr. Ben Carson.
But although the retired Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon has been using the last sentence of that quote to trash Obamacare, it dates back more than 60 years — from a pamphlet circulated in opposition to another president, Harry Truman, and his own attempt to expand health care coverage.
Some things really never change. Not only is the same red-scare flag being waved today, there's this: Neither then or now, no one seems to have evidence that such a bon mot ever passed Lenin's lips.
"It was a completely made-up quote," Princeton sociologist Paul Starr tells me.
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Creeping socialism was a pretty convincing argument in the Cold War years, and the AMA's political consultants organized meetings and put out pamphlets using the alleged Lenin quote.
But as Starr notes in his book, "The Library of Congress could not locate this quotation in Lenin's writings." ....
