Page "Socialized medicine" Paragraph 7

Government involvement in health care was ardently opposed by the AMA which distributed posters to doctors with slogans such as " Socialized medicine ... will undermine the democratic form of government.

" According to T. R.

Reid ( The Healing of America, 2009 ): " The term medicine ' was popularized by a public relations firm working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to disparage President Truman's proposal for a national health care system.

It was a label, at the dawn of the cold war, meant to suggest that anybody advocating universal access to health care must be a communist.

And the phrase has retained its political power for six decades.