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Opinion: After 50 years of ‘health crisis,’ chuck the Chicken Little rhetoric

The sky is not falling. It's possible to take a bipartisan approach to fixing the health care woes that are causing pain to so many Americans today.
Source: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Although Americans love anniversaries, we have overlooked the political importance of July 10, 1969. Speaking on that date from the Roosevelt Room of the White House, President Richard Nixon became the first president to declare that America faced a “massive crisis” in health care in the absence of “revolutionary change.”

Similar predictions of impending catastrophe have, incredibly, persisted through each presidency for a half-century. The Trump administration, for example, has warned that “the system we have and it cannot continue.” as the top priority for the federal government, as well as the evidence from the first two , this election season will surely bring more of the same.

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