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Last week several like-minded groups launched a campaign to defeat “Medicare for All” proposals, calling it the Coalition Against Socialized Medicine. One of the rotating banner images on its Internet home page is a picture of Vladimir Lenin, the Soviet Union founder, and a quote: “Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of a socialized state." “Socialized medicine” has been the epithet thrown at every proposal for universal healthcare offered in the past 100 years. But, did the architect of Soviet communism really put healthcare at the top of his priority list? Well, no. It turns out the quote widely circulated by the American Medical Association (AMA) is bogus, apparently made up from whole cloth. Its history reveals much about America’s decades-long debate over the government’s role in healthcare, and attempts by the AMA to shape it. It's well known that the AMA fought Medicare tooth and nail in the early 1960s, eventually throwing in the towel. But that was just one of a decades-long string of battles the AMA fought against the notion of universal health coverage. In fact, it wasn't until 1949 that the AMA stopped opposing any form of health insurance. In 1934, the House of Delegates passed a “statement of principles" that, among other things, declared that "no third party must be permitted to come between the patient and his physician in any medical relation." Richard Harris’s detailed history of the 1965 Medicare legislation, published in 1966 traced Medicare's origins through a series of proposals, beginning in 1920, for some kind of government role in helping people obtain healthcare when they couldn't pay out of pocket. From the AMA's perspective, the scariest was the so-called Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill introduced in 1945. This was genuine, full-on universal medical, dental, and nursing home care, to be paid for through a dedicated income tax. President Roosevelt was believed to be supportive but his death in April 1945 derailed the legislation for a time, and support in Congress weakened. The Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill’s prospects brightened considerably in 1949, however, when President Truman threw his full support behind it after his 1948 election. And that’s when the Lenin quote surfaced. According to Harris, the AMA hired a public relations firm, Whitaker & Baxter, with long experience in fighting "socialized medicine." As part of what turned out to be a $4.5-million AMA campaign to defeat the bill — that’s $48 million in today’s dollars. In total, Whitaker & Baxter distributed more than 54 million pieces of literature, at a cost of $1 million, on behalf of the AMA’s successful effort to defeat the bill. The campaign stated that universal healthcare was a 19th century German invention and a common characteristic of authoritarian governments -- "whether Fascist, Nazi, Communist or Socialist" -- and that American paychecks could be taxed as much as 10% to pay for the program. And then this: “Q. Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life?” "A. Lenin thought so. According to Lawrence Sullivan in his book ‘The Case Against Socialized Medicine,’ the founder of international revolutionary Communism once proclaimed socialized medicine 'the keystone of the arch of the Socialist State.'" Here’s how the original quote was framed: “The campaign for socialized medicine in the United States stems directly from Kremlin Communism. Lenin, the founder of international revolutionary Communism, once proclaimed socialized medicine 'the keystone of the arch of the Socialist State.' Nowhere in the world today is the profession of medicine more completely under the control of government than in the Soviet segments of Russia.” According to Harris, “The research staff of the Library of Congress has never been able to find this quotation, or anything like it, in Lenin’s works." The quote has been recycled -- and debunked -- repeatedly up to the present day. It certainly came up many times as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was debated in 2009 and 2010. Source: https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/healthpolicy/80448