“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:
If I see somebody who’s earning over $50,000 a year, who has made the calculated decision not to buy health insurance, I’m looking at somebody who is absolutely as irresponsible as anyone who was ever on welfare. Because what they’ve said is, A, I’m gambling that I won’t get sick, and B, I’m gambling that if I do get sick, I can cheat all my neighbors. Now, when you talk to hospitals, a very significant part of their non-collectibles are people who have money, but have calculated it’s not worth the cost to pay. And so I’m actually in favor of finding a way to say, whatever the appropriate level of income is, you ought to have either health insurance, or you ought to post a bond. But we have no right in this society to have a free rider approach, if we’re well off economically, to cheat our neighbors.
Source: Dave Weigel, Slate.com
How come no one is talking about the Defense Authorization Act, that stuff is real!
Wow, Mike, what is the Defense Authorization Act? Please tell us all about it!