Tommy Douglas CCF 50th Anniversary Speech on Health Care

Tommy Douglas speech 3 years before his death at the 50th anniversary of the founding of the CCF.
From Democracy Now (http://www.democracynow.org)

When you go back to your constituency and you run into somebody who says, Oh, its a good idea for you soft-hearted humanitarians, but we cant afford it, let me give you a simple statistic, which you can put down on a piece of paper and carry in your hand. And that is that our friends in the United States are spending nine percent of their gross national product—and they get a higher per capita gross national product than we do—they spend nine percent of their gross national product on healthcare, and 34 million of their people have no healthcare coverage. And in Canada, we spend seven percent of our gross national product, and every man, woman and child in Canada is covered under Medicare.

If you want a two-tiered health program, then just continue the way were going. And I remind you that in this movement, we pledged ourselves fifty years ago that we would provide healthcare for every man, woman and child, irrespective of their color, their race or their financial status, and, by God, were going to do it!

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Tommy Douglas
• Medicare
• US
• Canada
• Universal Coverage

[cunningangel]

So nice to see this old footage of Mr. Douglas. The fearsome debate going on in the US right now over healthcare genuinely baffles me sometimes.

-proud NDP supporter

[peasnhr]

Thanks for the reply!

Yes I was very glad that Democracy Now aired this footage!

[12345678919251]

Its now 16% of our gnp and 47 million are not insured. Universal healhcare for ALL americans now.

[happycan107]

wow...This guy really fuck us over didn't he?