“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick”
Obama – June 3, 2008
About 90-120 years from now, Obama will sit his daughters down on his knee and explain to them that there were no doctors in America before 2008.
Ben Franklin put up the money for the first public hospital. He cared for the poor, but also understood human nature and poverty.
“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.”
“I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.”
Our founders were great men of wisdom, and dismissing their writings will be our undoing.
Here’s another great Franklin quote, lest any doubt his stance…
“I have sometimes doubted whether the laws peculiar to England, which compel the rich to maintain the poor, have not given the latter a dependence, that very much lessens the care of providing against the wants of old age.”
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30017833?uid=3739520&uid=2&uid=4&uid=3739256&sid=21102805371211