More Congressional Republicans voted to pass Medicare than voted against it

Obviously a right-wing nut...

Here's an interesting bit of historical trivia in the context of our current political discourse. Although Ronald Reagan - in his role as General Electric toastmaster - famously attacked Medicare as a scheme to "socialize medicine," Republicans were not uniformly against a government-sponsored insurance plan to cover seniors.

Reagan's words sound crazy today, warning that if a Medicare bill passed, "you and I 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."  Yeah - totally nuts and even Paul Ryan is smart enough not to go there.

But in 1965 when Medicare was actually passed, more House Republicans voted for it than against it. 70 voted yea, while 68 voted nay.  In the Senate the GOP split went in the other direction - 13 yea, 17 nay - but the divide was still close enough to indicate the bi-partisan nature of the bill's passage.

In contrast, with Medicare currently the most cost-effective segment of our admittedly problematic health insurance and delivery system, today's Republicans pushing a scheme to destroy the most efficient piece of the health insurance puzzle signifies the party as a unified front of right-wing extremism with a "cost-effectiveness be damned" privatization obsession - hardly "conservative."