{"id":3655,"date":"2010-07-30T06:43:31","date_gmt":"2010-07-30T10:43:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/morningseditionists.com\/msblog\/?p=3655"},"modified":"2010-07-30T06:44:02","modified_gmt":"2010-07-30T10:44:02","slug":"happy-birthday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/2010\/07\/30\/happy-birthday\/","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>45 years ago today, LBJ signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, creating Single Payer health care for the 65 and over crowd.  At the bill-signing ceremony, Johnson enrolled Harry S. Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary (Bess was second), and presented him with the first ever Medicare card.  Among other things, this means that  I&#8217;m older than Medicare, which is a somewhat somber realization.  Even more somber (downright depressing, even), is the fact that, in four and a half decades, we never bothered to extend Medicare to everybody as a &#8220;perk&#8221; of being an American.  Because trying to ensure the health of our citizens is decidedly un-American, I guess (very European, though, like legislated vacation and subsidized child care.  Friggin&#8217; commies).  Much like unemployment benefits only encourage people to be drug-ingesting coach potatoes, health care benefits only encourage people to be slackers.  Or something.  I dunno.  All I know is we&#8217;ll never get Single Payer in my lifetime, because, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.correntewire.com\/trail_quotes_obama_single_payer\">as Illinois Senator Barack Obama once said<\/a>, &#8220;first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House.&#8221;  And that aint gonna happen, &#8216;cuz &#8220;we&#8221; won&#8217;t ever get the Republicans and Democrats out of the government. But, hey, Happy Birthday to Medicare anyway!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>45 years ago today, LBJ signed the Social Security Act of 1965 into law, creating Single Payer health care for the 65 and over crowd. At the bill-signing ceremony, Johnson enrolled Harry S. Truman as the first Medicare beneficiary (Bess was second), and presented him with the first ever Medicare card. Among other things, this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3655","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3655"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3657,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3655\/revisions\/3657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3655"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3655"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.morningseditionists.com\/msblog2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3655"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}