Day: November 29, 2011

Gingrich on Individual Mandate in 2005: ‘I’m in Favor of 300 Million-Payer System’

Jon Ponder

“I am very opposed to a single-payer system,” Newt Gingrich says in the video above, “but I’m actually in favor of a 300 million payer system.” The “300 million payer system” he referred to then has come to be known now as the “individual mandate,” or, alternately, “Obamacare’s Kenyan socialist boot on the neck of freedom.”

Gingrich continues, “Because one of my conclusions in the last six years, and founding the Center for Health Transformation, and looking at the whole system is, unless you have a hundred percent coverage, you can’t have the right preventive care, and you can’t have a rational system, because the cost-shifts are so irrational, and create second-order problems.”

Gingrich made these remarks in 2005 at the annual “Health Care Ceasefire,” on a panel with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and the moderator, former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux (DINO).

It should be pointed out that the individual mandate was developed by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing thimk tank, as an alternative to a single-payer, Medicare-for-everyone system, which would virtually put the health insurance industry — a key source of funding for the Republican Party — out of business.

Like Mitt Romney, Gingrich supported the individual mandate until the Democrats incorporated it into the Affordable Care Act.

Partial transcript:

[…]

Karl Rove Is Neither a Genius Nor Evil

Buck Banks

There is no doubt, certainly, that Rove is influential. But, as I spent time speaking to insiders from both parties about him, I initially struggled to pin down the exact nature of his resurgent influence. The classic line on Rove has always been that his political instincts are unrivaled by any Republican since the heyday of his mentor, Lee Atwater. Yet, while Crossroads undoubtedly played an important role in the 2010 campaign by flooding the airwaves with ads for Republican Senate candidates, the only thing memorable about these ads was their omnipresence.

— Walter Shapiro, writing in the New Republic.

Said GOP strategist Matthew Dowd: “The whole Rove brand as an evil genius is wrong. Karl is neither.”